Quick Start Guide

Cost calculations

Quick Start Guide

Calculate production costs for your recipes and items for sale.

Set up ingredients

In Fillet, ingredients are the building blocks of everything you do.

You can enter many different details for an Ingredient, like nutrition or edible portion.

Tip: To set up a new ingredient quickly, simply enter its name and a price — you’ll need these to do cost calculations.

To set up a new ingredient price, enter a unit of measurement, the quantity per unit, and a monetary amount.

If you often switch between mass and volume measurements, it’s a good idea to set up density for your key ingredients.

Set up recipes

In Fillet, recipes are the workhorse of your cost calculations.

Tip: To quickly set up a new recipe, all you need to do is add some ingredients.

Or add a recipe into another recipe (sub-recipes) to do advanced cost calculations.

You can also set up custom units of measurement for recipe yield, for example, “slices”, “loaves”, “bowls”. Or use the default yield unit, “servings”.

In Fillet, recipes are flexible and powerful. Stack recipes together to create menu items, which are your products for sale.

When you create a recipe, you can design it to be a base recipe, or a foundation recipe that you use in many different products. Or you can set it up to be used on its own — even if a menu item contains a single recipe and nothing else, you can still calculate profit.

In a recipe, Fillet shows you a breakdown of cost: the cost of each component, and food cost versus labor cost.²

Fillet automatically calculates the cost of a recipe using your ingredient prices and activities.

Set up to calculate labor cost

In Fillet, activities are tasks with a cost per hour.

You can create activities in the Labor tab of the Fillet web app.

Tip: To set up a new activity, all you need to do is enter its name and a cost per hour ($).

Whether you have a team or work alone, you can use activities to factor in labor cost.

The Labor feature helps you to track and understand the production cost of your menu items and recipes: Food cost plus labor cost gives you the total cost of producing your items for sale.²