Recipes and automatic stock deduction: how selling a dish moves your inventory

“Stock updates automatically” is the sentence every system prints on its website. What it means in practice depends entirely on one thing you have to build yourself: the recipe.

A recipe is a bill of materials

For every menu item — and every variant of it, because a large is not a small — a recipe lists what one portion consumes:

Pick one base unit per ingredient and make every recipe speak it. Buying oil by the litre and using it by the millilitre is fine; recording it both ways is how a cost ends up wrong by a factor of a thousand.

Yield and waste are where the money hides

Two percentages sit on the recipe itself, and they are the difference between the invoice price and the truth:

• Yield % — how much of what you bought reaches the plate. Whole chicken bought at a given price per kilo does not arrive on the plate at that price; boning and trimming take their share. Effective cost = purchase price ÷ yield.
• Waste % — the routine, expected loss in prep for this specific item.

A system that costs a dish from the invoice price alone will always tell you the margin is better than it is. That is a comfortable number, and comfortable numbers are the expensive kind.

What happens the moment the item is sold

When the order is confirmed, the system walks the recipe and writes an inventory transaction for each ingredient, marked with a reason of RecipeDeduction. Not a note, not a nightly job — a movement, at that moment, against that branch’s stock.

That single mechanism is what makes several other things possible:

• The plate cost is booked against the sale price, so margin is known per order rather than per month.
• Low-stock thresholds fire while you can still order, not after you have run out mid-service.
• A void or refund reverses the same movements, so cancelled food does not quietly stay sold.
• Stock is per branch, so a busy Friday at one location does not empty another’s numbers.

Substitutions, without breaking the cost

Kitchens substitute. Recipes allow a defined substitute per ingredient with a conversion factor, so swapping one item for another keeps quantities and costs coherent instead of turning into an untracked adjustment.

Automatic is not the same as accurate

This is the part worth being blunt about. Deduction is automatic; accuracy is a discipline. A recipe that says 120 g when the kitchen serves 160 g will deduct 120 g, confidently, forever. Your theoretical stock will look healthy while the shelf empties.

The check is a stocktake. Count the real shelf, compare it to what the system thinks should be there, and read the gap:

The number does not tell you which one. It tells you where to look, on which ingredient, at which branch.

Waste and surplus are separate entries, on purpose

A dropped tray is not a sale, and last night’s unsold prep is not a loss until it expires. Both are recorded on their own — waste with a reason, surplus with an expiry and a status — so your food cost and your reports can tell “we sold it” apart from “we threw it away.” Merging them is how a kitchen loses the ability to explain a bad month.

Where to start

Do not recipe your whole menu on day one. Recipe your top twenty sellers, which are usually most of your food cost, then extend. Twenty accurate recipes will teach you more about your margins than a hundred guessed ones.