ReciPal’s costing feature makes it easy for food businesses to understand their costs and determine the optimal pricing strategy. This feature just got a lot more powerful with an updated interface and the ability to store historical costing information. In this blog we’ll look at how you can use our recipe costing tools to get a handle on pricing and drive business growth.

How the costing feature works

To utilize the costing feature simply navigate to the cost section of any recipe.

From there, you’ll see the ingredients that go into your recipe and be able to input exactly how you pay for each item. For example, let's say you buy 15 dozen large eggs at a time for $59.99. You can set the unit to large eggs, the quantity to 180 (15 x 12), and the price to $59.99. With this info the system will calculate how much you spend on eggs per batch of your recipe.

Ingredient costs are dynamic, meaning if you use eggs in 10 different recipes, you only need to enter their cost once. Further, if you update the price of eggs on one recipe it will update across all the other recipes that use it. While you can enter costs within a recipe itself, there is also a view of ingredients and costs across all of your recipes (located at the bottom of your Recipe Dashboard page), making it easy to enter and adjust everything in one spot.

More than just food costs

Within ReciPal you're not just limited to food costs. You can also enter costs related to labor, packaging, overhead or other categories.

💪 Pro Tip - you can create custom ingredients for non-food items. If your cookie product goes in a box that has a bow and sticker on it, each of those item’s prices can be tracked individually. Doing this allows a more granular view of your costs (as well as seeing how those costs change over time…more on that later).

Once you enter all your costs, the system shows you the total price per batch and per package of your recipe. Each of the categories will be graphed so you can easily see the breakdown of your food, packaging, labor, and overhead costs.

New Features - Historical costing, Bulk Upload, API Integration

Historical Costing

Aside from the improved visualization, there’s now the ability to track the cost of your product (and the ingredients that make it up) over time - we call this historical costing. This powerful feature is only available to subscribers.

As the price of an ingredient changes over time you can update that within our system. We now keep a record of all those changes both on an individual ingredient level and a recipe level.

Our system produces a graph of how costs have changed over time. If you set a margin that you want to hit, but the cost of an ingredient goes up - the system will reflect what the new consumer cost should be to hit your margin goals.

Seeing these changes over time can help you better understand the history, trends, and how you should adapt your prices to the evolving landscape. Tracking these cost changes opens the door to even more powerful financial tools in the future.

Bulk Upload

From the "All Ingredient Costs" page we've introduced a bulk upload option. If you've got a lot of ingredients, it can sometimes be faster to make updates on a spreadsheets rather then directly within the platform. So, we've added a CSV template that you can download with all your ingredients. You simply update costs on the document and then upload it back into ReciPal.

API Access

Updates to costing are now accessible through the API. This means you can programmatically set and edit costs allowing for better integrations and time saving. You can check out our costing API documentation as well as the other powerful capabilities our API enables.

Wrapping it up

If you haven’t yet utilized our recipe costing features we encourage you to give it a try. With just a few inputs you can gain access to important financial insights about your products!