Revolution Ordering elevates food and hospitality businesses using restaurant delivery software with costing saving features built-in. Through food cost software and analysis, restaurant business owners and managers can more easily control costs, optimize inventory for menu ingredients, and streamline operations.

Restaurant owners and operators often explore several inventory costing methods. They need to know the expense of everything from each menu item to the cost of hourly employee work. Helpfully, food costing software funnels its analysis down to the menu item, ingredient, and individual order. This can also include labor cost and loss calculations. 

In other words, food costing through online ordering solutions shows the expense of preparing and producing each dish. These recipe cost calculations add visibility in pricing, clearer direction while planning, and a better understanding of profitability. 

Today, small and large restaurants find it easy to improve their daily process and profits when using food costing software. In this post, learn how food costing software can make optimizing some of your restaurant’s expenses simple.

Key Takeaway: Food costing software enhances cost control and increases profitability through better insight, tracking, management, and optimizations.

4 Food Costing Software Features

By using food costing software, owners and managers can easily track and analyze expenses. This includes individual menu item analysis to labor cost management and reporting. 

You’ll find food costing software like Revolution Ordering leads to ideal menu items, optimal stock levels, and a lower cost of labor.

1. Recipe and Menu Costing

For each purchased ingredient, item of inventory, and prepared dish, food costing software simplifies the accurate calculation of true expense. For each recipe, food costing software considers each factor in the course of operations. That includes ingredients, quantities, unit prices, waste costs, and recipe variations. 

Through inventory and menu analysis, restaurants using food costing software to quickly identify the optimal ingredients and recipes. They ensure each item offers a balance of customer satisfaction and fiscal sense. 

With a deeper understanding of costs, portions, and menu items, businesses effectively price and profit with cost-effective dishes that attract customers. Without it, the cost of goods sold for a restaurant remains unclear and the best strategies for growth stay uncertain.

2. Inventory Management

Restaurant inventory management demands efficient tracking, great organization, and monitoring to guarantee item availability, maintain smooth operation, and minimize unnecessary costs. Through ingredient tracking, sustainable restaurants and hospitality businesses can see consumption patterns, make better buying decisions, and avoid stock shortages.

Food costing software also presents the opportunity for waste reduction. Businesses can control portions, implement new practices, and simplify kitchen processes by monitoring ingredients, spoilage, and restaurant food waste with more sophistication and cost-efficiency.

Automating stock replenishment with better data and insight, enterprise restaurants use food costing software to achieve a fresh, stable inventory. They set up automated reorders, spot consumption trends, and get notifications on low ingredients or overstock.

3. Labor Cost Management

Revolution Ordering enables restaurant and food business owners to streamline processes, boost efficiency, and add cost controls to critical areas for optimization, including labor. Our food costing software anticipates sales and spots trends, helping managers create schedules that minimize labor costs. Better forecasting means you can save hours, eliminate shift conflicts, avoid overtime, and increase restaurant sales.

Food cost software and automation features empower businesses with inventory, cost, pricing, and scheduling insights. But, they also reduce the time needed to complete manual tasks. 

With ordering, inventory, and report automations, employees handle more pressing tasks faster. This is all possible while the restaurant saves money through optimal scheduling, pricing, and replenishment.

4. Reporting and Analytics

For restaurants and food businesses, fresh insight into their food costs, inventory, and menu items often leads to new growth opportunities. To help, food cost software analyzes financial performance through sales data, ingredient expenses, and labor costs to calculate accurate profit margins. Owners then know their highest- and lowest-profit items to reallocate resources and cut costs.

To make reporting and analytics even simpler, food costing software presents your favorite metrics and performance indicators at a glance. From restaurant KPI dashboards, owners watch and respond to sales growth, average check sizes, costs, inventory levels, and customer satisfaction. From a central source of truth, managers and owners get immediate insight into operations.

Custom reports also allow restaurants to design tailored reports that suit their business needs. Selecting the desired metrics, filters, data points, or trends, managers and owners quickly see how food cost software provides in-depth analysis. These custom templates then support strategic decision-making. 

6 Food Costing Software Benefits

As businesses gain this more complete understanding of food costs and savings opportunities, food costing software positively impacts the bottom line through business-wide benefits. By leveraging data and automations, the following benefits spell more savings, smoother operation, and increased profits for enterprise restaurants.

1. Improved Profit Margins. Food costing software cuts costs, tracks expenses, and determines profit margins with incredible accuracy. Owners and operators can then easily re-engineer menus and focus on expanding business with confidence in their data.
2. Accurate Pricing Strategy. Through food cost software, restaurants establish more accurate and profitable pricing. They know the real cost of ingredients, labor, and other overhead. This means their pricing covers their prime cost and achieves wider margins.
3. Streamlined Inventory Management. Getting real-time updates on ingredients used, stock levels, and item warnings means restaurants simplify inventory. Automatically, online ordering integrations alert leadership and ensure seamless replenishment.
4. Optimal Menu Curation. Understanding trends, popularity, and profitability, restaurants use food cost software to curate more satisfying menus. This supports customer satisfaction, cost reduction, and higher ROI.
5. Minimized Food Waste. Food costing software minimizes waste by tracking shelf life, suggesting portions, and reducing needless production. This ensures inventory control, spoilage reduction, and cost decreases.‍
6. Efficient Labor Management. With automation, tracking, and reports, these tools indirectly shrink labor costs. By increasing efficiency and speeding up once-manual tasks–managers enjoy more control with less effort.

Frequently Asked Questions About Food Costing Software

Restaurants must know the true cost of preparing and serving their priced items to ensure profitability and growth. Answers to the most frequent questions about food costing tools will help you see the value of a comprehensive food cost system.

What is basic food costing?

Getting a restaurant food cost means listing each menu item’s ingredients and calculating the expense of each to get an overall recipe cost. Food cost calculators and recipe costing software speed up the analysis of an entire restaurant’s menu. 

If you don’t have a recipe cost calculator, follow these steps:

1. List all recipe ingredients and ingredient costs.
2. Determine ingredient quantities for the recipe.
3. Multiply ingredient quantities by purchase prices.
4. Add up those totals for each recipe’s basic food cost.

What is a food cost system?

Food cost systems control expenses through software tools tracking recipe costs, managing inventory, curating menus, and analyzing profits—almost automatically. A food cost system can help restaurants make better strategic choices about their prices, menu, online ordering, resource usage, and much more. These tools aid businesses in controlling costs while maximizing profitability.

What tools can control food costs?

Food costing software remains one of the most essential tools to control food costs. Food cost calculators track ingredients, analyze recipes, manage inventory, and can even make menus more profitable.  

Restaurants often rely on many different tools to reveal true expenses and optimize food cost savings. But, most food cost software comes with these cost-saving features, insights, and automations. Restaurants using these integrated tools easily control portions, engineer menus, perfect schedules, and create impressive savings.

Expand and Cut Expenses with Revolution Ordering

Revolution Ordering supports food and hospitality businesses in expanding operations with online ordering software. We deliver profit-optimized integrations through the best food delivery management systems for enterprise.

Through restaurant delivery software, we increase efficiency and drive performance for restaurants. They seek better automations, data, custom reports, and bottom-line savings. Revolution Ordering’s system of reports, automations, and insights reveals these opportunities.

If you’re looking to cut costs, Revolution Ordering can open your business to omnichannel, off-premise ordering. As a result, restaurants lower costs, reduce human error, and automate manual tasks to enhance savings even further. Discover all that Revolution Ordering has to offer, and schedule your demo.