Menu-level costing tells you what a dish should cost. This tracker tells you what your kitchen actually spent, using opening stock, purchases and closing stock for the period, matched against revenue. The gap between the two numbers is usually where the waste, theft or portioning drift is hiding.
Food cost % = (opening inventory plus purchases minus closing inventory) divided by revenue, times 100.
| Opening inventory value | 50000 ₹ |
| Purchases during period | 200000 ₹ |
| Closing inventory value | 45000 ₹ |
| Food revenue for period | 650000 ₹ |
The value of raw food stock on hand at the start and end of the period you are measuring, usually a week or a month. This means a physical stock count, not what your purchase records imply should be there.
The difference is usually waste, over-portioning, theft, or comps and staff meals that never got billed. Menu costing assumes every gram is sold at full recipe spec, actual operations rarely hit that exactly.
Weekly if you can manage a stock count that often, monthly at minimum. Waiting for the month-end P&L to find a cost problem means you have already lost a month of margin to it.
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