Recipe costing: what a product actually costs to make

Recipe costing

Almost every bakery costing spreadsheet breaks in the same two places. The supplier sells you a sack; the recipe uses grams. And the price on that sack changed three months ago and the spreadsheet still holds the old one.

ibakepro fixes both by keeping the cost in one place, converting units on the way through and rewriting every dependent figure when the source number moves. Costing is on every plan.

The true purchase price, not a guessed unit price

A pantry item stores a cost per unit. You rarely know that number, because you bought a 25 kg (55 lb) sack, not a gram. The cost calculator on the pantry item takes what you paid and the pack size, and does the division for you.

Tiny unit costs are kept exactly rather than rounded away. That sounds fussy until you cost per gram, where rounding too early makes cheap bulk flour cost literally nothing and every recipe built on it wrong by the whole flour line.

Units convert, and refuse when they should not

Conversions are exact: weight (kilogram, gram, pound, ounce), volume (litre and millilitre, with US and UK measures held as separate entries because a US pint and an imperial pint are not the same volume), count (each, piece, dozen) and length.

Use 50 mL (about 1.7 fl oz) of a supply priced per litre and it costs a twentieth of the litre price, not fifty times it.

What is in the total

Cost is assembled from four parts, in this order.

Ingredients are the recipe lines, priced at current pantry cost. A component that already owns a pantry item is not counted a second time at product level.

Labour is minutes times your hourly rate. Flat, no complexity multiplier.

Overhead is a percentage you set, applied to ingredients plus labour.

Foundation is your fixed monthly bills, which you enter in Settings under pricing: electricity, gas, water, internet, insurance and rent, divided by the number of orders you expect in a month. That gives a per-order share of the costs that exist whether or not you bake today.

When a supplier price moves

Change a pantry item's price and every component and every product that uses it is recosted, everywhere that cost appears, including in search and on your storefront. That part is automatic and needs nothing from you.

Your sell price does not move. It stays exactly where you set it. Instead the affected products are flagged for price review, with a suggested price that would restore your target margin, and a badge appears on your products list.

In review you can apply the suggested price for a variant, type your own or dismiss the flag and keep the price you have. Applying it writes the new price and pushes it out to search and the storefront in the same step.

The flag has tolerances so it is not noise: a product is raised for review only when the cost or the margin has moved by enough to matter. See repricing when ingredient costs move for how to decide what to do with the list, and pricing a custom cake for building the first one.

Customer-choice options work the same way. The ingredient cost stored on an option is re-priced from live pantry costs automatically; the upcharge you charge for that option stays frozen until you change it.

Design decisions

• It does not reprice anything on its own. Costs cascade, prices wait for a person. Dismissing a review is a valid answer and it sticks.
• Labour, overhead and fixed costs are yours to set. All three start at zero, so set them before you cost anything.
• Conversions happen only where they are exact. A recipe written in cups is priced per cup, never guessed from grams.
• Packaging is costed separately, per fulfilment method, which is its own thing.
• The pantry price is the price you entered, updated when you update it. Expenses you record push out to your books through accounting sync, which runs one way, out.