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Menu, recipes & variants

Build a restaurant menu, attach recipes so a sold dish draws down its ingredients, and reuse dishes across branches with templates.

10 min readOwnerManagerChef

Menu categories

Dashboard → Menu → Categories

  1. Open Dashboard → Menu → Categories and click Create.

  2. Enter the Menu Category Name and pick an icon.

  3. Click Create.

Categories are the tabs a waiter taps at the till — Starters, Mains, Drinks, Desserts. Order them the way service flows, not alphabetically.

Add a menu item

Dashboard → Menu → Menu Items → Create

Namerequired
As it should read on the ticket and the receipt.
Pricerequired
The authoritative selling price. The server charges this regardless of what a till sends, unless the member holds Change prices.
Descriptionoptional
Shown on the item record; useful for staff training.
Categoryrequired
Which tab it appears under at the POS.
Availablerequired
Only available items appear at the till. Turn it off for a dish that is 86'd instead of deleting it.
Assigned kitchen / baroptional
Station badge on the kitchen ticket, so the bar and the kitchen can see at a glance which lines are theirs.
Barcodeoptional
For packaged items a scanner can ring up directly.
Templateoptional
Links this dish to an organization-wide menu template.

86 a dish without breaking history

Turning Available off removes an item from the till instantly and keeps every past order, report figure and recipe intact. Deleting is for items you never sold.

Recipes — make a sale draw down ingredients

Dashboard → Menu → Menu Items → edit an item → Recipe / ingredients

A menu item on its own is just a price. Attach a recipe and every sale deducts the ingredients it consumed from inventory, which is what makes food cost and stock-on-hand meaningful in a restaurant.

  1. Open the menu item and find the Recipe / ingredients panel.

  2. Pick an inventory item as an ingredient, enter the quantity used per portion, and add it.

    Quantity is in the ingredient's base unit — 150 g of beef, 30 ml of oil. An ingredient can only be added once.

  3. Repeat for every ingredient, up to 50 lines.

  4. Save the recipe.

    The panel shows each line's cost from the ingredient's average cost, so you can see the plate cost as you build it.

What a sold dish does to your stocknoyesyesyesBeef stew rung up atthe tillHas a recipe?Beef −150 gPotato −200 gOnly the sold countermovesStock is untouchedPlate cost recorded onthe orderFrom each ingredient'saverage costGross profit and marginare realRefunded later?Every ingredient goesback

Without a recipe a dish is only a price. With one, every plate that leaves the pass is subtracted from the store room — and a refund puts it all back.

Read this diagram as text
  • Beef stew rung up at the till → Has a recipe?
  • Has a recipe? → Only the sold counter moves (no)
  • Has a recipe? → Beef −150 g (yes)
  • Has a recipe? → Potato −200 g (yes)
  • Beef −150 g → Plate cost recorded on the order
  • Potato −200 g → Plate cost recorded on the order
  • Plate cost recorded on the order → Gross profit and margin are real
  • Plate cost recorded on the order → Refunded later?
  • Refunded later? → Every ingredient goes back (yes)

Ingredient costs drive your margins

Recipe cost comes from each ingredient's average cost on the inventory record. If costs are stale, your gross-profit report is confidently wrong. Update costs when supplier prices move — receiving stock through purchase orders does this for you.

Variants — sizes and portions

Menu item → Variants

Use variants when the same dish sells in more than one size: Single and Double, Regular and Large, a 30 ml tot from a bottle. The cashier picks the variant after tapping the item, and the price adjusts by the variant's delta.

Variant name
Large, Double, 30 ml.
Price delta
Added to the item price — 150 for a large, -50 for a small, 0 for a free choice.
Base quantity
Stock consumed per unit sold, in base units. This is how a bottle sells as tots without inventing a separate product.
SKU and barcode
Optional codes for scanning a specific size.

Menu templates across branches

Dashboard → Menu → Templates

Templates live at the organization level and describe a dish once — name, description, category and a suggested price. Branches link their own menu items to a template, so a chain keeps one vocabulary while each branch keeps its own price.

One dish, many branchesMenu templateOrganization level: name,description, suggestedpriceBranch A menu itemIts own price andavailabilityBranch B menu itemDifferent price, same dishBranch A recipeDraws on Branch A stockBranch B recipeDraws on Branch B stockDeleting the templaterequires unlinkingfirst

Templates keep the name and description consistent across the chain while each branch keeps its own price and its own stock.

Read this diagram as text
  • Menu template → Branch A menu item
  • Menu template → Branch B menu item
  • Branch A menu item → Branch A recipe
  • Branch B menu item → Branch B recipe

  1. Open Dashboard → Menu → Templates and click New template.

  2. Enter the name, an optional description, a category and a suggested price.

  3. Click Create.

  4. In each branch, link the branch's menu item to the template.

    The templates list shows how many branches are using each one.

Unlink before deleting

A template still linked to menu items cannot be deleted. Unlink it from those items first — this prevents a rename in head office quietly orphaning branch menus.

Bulk import

Dashboard → Menu → Menu Items → Import

A menu can be imported from CSV the same way as inventory: upload the file, review the valid and invalid row summary, fix what failed, then import. Use it for the initial load and maintain the menu in the app afterwards.