Has this ever happened to you? You’re running your restaurant, it’s popular, and you’re busy around the clock. Yet, you’re not making any money. You can’t work any harder, but if you’re not turning a profit, you need to make some changes. After you’ve looked at your overhead, there’s one thing staring right back at you – your menu.

Your menu is the engine that drives sales to your restaurant. Engineering your menu can bring in more sales with increased profits. You can use psychology to design your menu to be more appealing, but the bottom line is you must take a hard look at your menu items and adjust your pricing accordingly.

To get accurate recipe costing, you need to be sure all your systems are operating in sync – your inventory management and accounting systems, vendor pricing, and your POS system. To gain precise food cost calculations, you need to get down to the nitty-gritty – calculating the usage and yield of every one of the ingredients in your recipes. 

You’re thinking, that’s a lot of work. True, but the more accurate you can get in calculating your recipe costing, the more useful the information will be in your pricing. Here are some suggestions.

Analyze the Market – What are other restaurants (your competition) charging for a similar dish? Determining this isn’t as hard as it used to be since most restaurants post their menus online. 

Calculate Actual vs. My Best Guess Food Cost – If you have restaurant inventory-management software integrated with your accounting and POS system, you can track your inventory against your sales and calculate the usage of the ingredients in your recipes over time, giving you a good idea of cost and your profit margin.

Optimize for Profitability – As you continue to determine your menu pricing, use your recipe costing information to experiment with changing portion sizes or ingredients to maintain the item price but increase the profit margin.

Simplify the Process with Automation – An automated inventory management system with recipe costing will help you maintain up-to-date pricing.

Managing your restaurant’s recipe costing is essential in today’s volatile economy. Investing in an all-in-one restaurant management system that brings together accounting, inventory, operations, payroll, HR, and scheduling in a cloud-based platform integrated with your POS system will lead to a profitable menu and a successful restaurant with much less work for you. 

Since 2005, Quikstone Capital Solutions has helped thousands of restaurants in need of working capital for their business. With fast and easy funding from Quikstone, restaurant owners have purchased new equipment, including a restaurant management system, expanded or remodeled their restaurants, hired staff, and added new digital technology like self-ordering kiosks. If your restaurant accepts credit cards, you could qualify for up to $250,000 and have those funds in just 2-5 business days. There’s a simple application, and no collateral is needed. Contact us today to get started. 

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