Restaurant software for menu costs, waste and daily profit

Your prices are printed. Your costs are not.

A menu price stays put for months. The market price of beef, tomatoes, cooking oil and charcoal moves every week, and nobody reprints the menu when it does.

The usual answer is a feel for it. But "roughly" does a lot of work across three thousand plates a month: two hundred shillings of drift on each is UGX 600,000 you never watched leave.

Recording what you buy and sell, dish by dish, turns the feeling into a figure. A cost price per dish, revised when the market moves, shows which half of the menu carries the other.

How a restaurant runs it

1. Set each dish up with a portion costWhat one plate costs in ingredients goes in as the cost price; the menu price is the selling price. That pair makes every profit figure real.
2. Record the order when it's servedEach sale is tagged to branch and staff. Sales history filters by date, staff or payment method, so cash and Mobile Money reconcile at close.
3. Count stock in the store, not on the plateSacks of rice, crates of soda, oil and gas cylinders are products with real counts. A cooked plate is not worth counting.
4. Write off what spoilsFish that turned, a pot that burned. Record it as a stock adjustment with a reason and it becomes a cost, not a hole in the count.

The menu you'll set up

Pick "Restaurant & café" at sign-up and this list is already there. Dishes and drinks carry prices; the sacks, crates and cylinders in the store sit alongside them as stock you count.

The dish is what you sell; the sack of rice is what you count. Keeping both puts the evening's takings and the week's shopping in one profit figure.

A month at a 40-seat restaurant

Spoilage and staff meals came to UGX 1,450,000 — about eight per cent of everything the month kept, from the one line most kitchens never write down.

What PesaScope is not

It is not a kitchen display system. Orders do not appear on a screen over the pass, and nothing tells the cook what to fire next.

It does not do table management — no floor plan, no table numbers, no splitting a bill by seat. A tab is a credit sale against a named customer, sitting on the debtors list until they settle.

What it does is the money: what was sold, by whom, at what price, against what it cost. If you later want a recipe per dish costed, there is an optional production module, off unless you switch it on.

Where a restaurant loses money

1. Portions that growThe app cannot see the serving spoon. But a cost per plate that stops matching your ingredient spend is the signal to go and watch the serving.
2. Staff meals nobody countsEleven people eating twice a day is a real food cost. Record it as a stock adjustment and you at least know its size.

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Questions restaurants ask