Menu margin alert
Your dishes, costed from your price book. When a delivery comes in dearer, see which plates lost margin since you set their price, by how much and why, and the price that wins it back.
Help and background Back to the tool
How it works
- 1 Sign in with your email, and log a delivery or two in your price book.
- 2 Put each dish in once: its menu price before tax, the day you set that price, and what goes into it from your book. If a recipe makes a tray, say how many plates.
- 3 Each plate is costed twice: at the prices you were paying the day you set its price, and at your latest prices.
- 4 The dishes whose food cost has risen come first, with what each lost a plate (and a week, if you say how many sell), the ingredients behind it, and two prices that win it back.
- 5 Reprice it, or keep the price and measure from today. Either way it's one tap, and it can be undone.
Free, with a free account. Your dishes are kept in your LocoTap account next to your price book, and only you can see them. They're never put in a link or in our logs. Signed out, you can try a made-up example, and nothing is kept.
Good to know
- "Then" means which prices?
- For each ingredient, the last price in your book on or before the day you set the dish's price. If you only started logging it later, its first price stands in, and the line says so. "Now" is the latest price in the book. So the alert only knows what you've logged: a delivery that isn't in the book doesn't count.
- What are the two prices it suggests?
- One keeps the dollars you made on each plate, by adding what the food now costs extra. The other keeps food cost at the same share of the price it had, which lands a little higher. Both are rounded up to the price ending you pick in the panel. They're starting points: what your guests will pay, and what the place down the street charges, matter as much.
- Can a recipe use cups when I buy by the kilo?
- Not yet. A line is measured the same way its ingredient is bought: by weight, by volume or by the piece. Weigh a cup of flour once and put it in grams. Spoons and cups work for things bought by volume, like milk or oil.
- Before tax?
- Put the menu price before tax, and keep the price book the same way, so food cost is a share of what you actually keep. Most groceries carry no sales tax, but some things you buy do (verify with your invoices).
- Is this my real food cost?
- It's the cost of the recipe as written, at the prices you logged. Waste, trim, staff meals and heavy hands aren't in it, so your real food cost runs higher. Use it to see what moved and where, not as your accounts: this is a guide, not accounting advice.
Where it fits in a restaurant
Every week Prices in, margins checked, the counts against the sales, and next week's pars.
Its work comes from
It hands its work on to
- Food cost gap Your dishes and what goes in them Works now
- Par levels by weekday Your dishes, to count sales against Works now
- Line recipe cards The one menu, so a dish is named once Works now
- Kitchen ticket screen The one menu, so a dish is named once Works now
- Wholesale price sheet What each item costs to make Works now
A hand-off only moves when you press it, and never through a link: signed in, the next tool reads your account's book; signed out, it waits in this browser until the next tool picks it up.
Every week
More for this part of the day
Ingredient price book
Put in each delivery as it comes. Every ingredient keeps its own price line, so you see the day something jumps, which supplier was cheaper last time, and how fast your own costs are rising.
Save it: every price you've paid, in your account
Food cost gap
Count what's on the shelf, put in what sold, and see what the kitchen used against what your recipes say it should have. The gap in dollars and points, the ingredients behind it, and what a plate really gets.
Save it: your stock counts and the gap over time, in your account
Bar inventory by weight
Put each open bottle on a kitchen scale and read what's left in it to the millilitre. Count the shelf in minutes, see what the bar poured against what the till rang, which bottles run heavy and by how much a pour, and what to order.
Save it: your bottles and shelf counts, in your account
Par levels by weekday
Put in what sold each day and see how much to prep for each weekday, from your own usual days. Holidays and Oktoberfest are on the calendar, odd days stay out of the sums, and the AI can draft how next week may differ.
Save it: your daily sales by item, in your account
Staff schedule maker
Build the week's shifts over your busy hours. It flags Ontario break, rest and overtime rules as you go, then prints for the back-room wall.
Save it: a shared staff calendar
Prime cost check
Put in a week's sales, what the food and drinks cost and everyone on staff, and see prime cost as a share of sales, with vacation pay, CPP and EI on top of wages. See which days ran heavy on staff, three ways to get to your own target, every week side by side, and print a report for the week.
Save it: your weeks, staff and rates