Item Costs

Every item can record what it costs you, beside what you charge. Costs are internal: they never appear on a quote, a docket or your online store.

• Menu items. Link a recipe and the cost is worked out from its ingredients (see Recipes & Food Cost). Or type a figure under Manual cost assessment: food plus labour if you make it, your buy-in price if you buy it ready-made. With both, whichever was set more recently is used.
• Beverages. Your purchase cost per unit.
• Equipment and miscellaneous. Choose how you supply it. Hired or bought in: type the cost per unit, what you pay the hire company or supplier for one on a job. Owned: Puree works out a cost per use from what the item is worth and how long it lasts; see Owned equipment: cost per use below.
• Bundles. A bundle has no cost of its own: it is its contents’ costs, times how many of each one bundle holds. The item lists each content’s cost and the total, and there is no cost for the bundle until every content has one. See Bundles.

Margin and the Cost column

With a price and a cost, the item shows the margin: food cost % on a menu item, margin on everything else. On the items list, menu items gain a Cost column when you use recipes, and every group has one when estimated quote margins are turned on for your account. Estimated margins are in beta and switched on account by account; see Estimated Cost & Margin on Quotes. It shows each item’s cost, its margin and where the cost came from: recipe, manual, owned or contents.

Owned equipment: cost per use

When you own an item (chairs, glassware, linen, chafing dishes) there is no hire bill to put against a job, but every job still wears it out a little. Puree treats that like depreciation, spread over the jobs the item lasts rather than over years, and adds what each job costs you to turn it around.

Set How you supply it to Owned and fill in:

• Replacement value: what buying a new one costs today. Use today’s price, not what you originally paid, so the cost keeps up with what you would actually spend to replace it.
• Expected uses: how many jobs one lasts before it is worn out, lost or broken.
• Handling per use (optional): what each job costs you in cleaning, laundry, polishing or small repairs.

The cost per use is:

Replacement value ÷ Expected uses + Handling per use

In the screenshot that is $15.00 ÷ 100 = $0.15 of wear per job, plus $0.20 handling, so $0.35 a use. Puree shows it as you type, with the margin it leaves against the item’s price (65% here). The result is rounded to the nearest cent.

Working out expected uses from breakage. For glassware and crockery it is usually breakage and loss, not wear, that ends an item’s life. Turn your loss rate into uses by dividing 1 by it: if you lose about 4% of your wine glasses on a typical job, each glass lasts 1 ÷ 4% = 25 uses. A $6 glass that costs $0.15 to wash then comes to $6 ÷ 25 + $0.15 = $0.39 a use.

On a quote, the cost is the cost per use times the quantity: 120 of the item above cost 120 × $0.35 = $42.00 on that job. Because it is worked out from the replacement value, you change an owned item’s cost on the item itself; from a quote you can only override it for that one quote (see Estimated Cost & Margin on Quotes).

For setting up items themselves, see Items & Categories.