Inventory value and food cost

This is the section that answers “what is my kitchen actually costing me”. It is labelled Margin control, headed Inventory value and food cost, and lives under Catalog → Inventory → Costs & waste.

Plans

Signature, Enterprise

Can it be switched off?

Yes — an owner or manager can turn it off under Setup → Features.

Needs first

Pantry inventory. This stays off until all of them are in your plan and switched on.

What the numbers are built from

The screen states its own method: “Sales use completed orders created in the selected period. Cost coverage shows how much movement history has a captured unit cost.”

Read that twice before you act on a figure. Two things are in it:

• Only completed orders count as sales. Cancelled and open orders are not in the denominator.
• The costs come from your own movement history. Where you never captured a unit cost, there is nothing to compute from.

The four figures

Figure	What it tells you
Inventory value	What is on your shelves right now, at average unit cost.
Theoretical food cost	What the period’s sales should have consumed, shown as a percentage of sales.
Waste cost	What you recorded as waste in the period.
Cost coverage	How much of your movement history has a captured cost.

Theoretical is the operative word in the second one. It is what your recipes say the sales consumed, not what left the shelf. The gap between theoretical and actual is where over-portioning, unrecorded waste and shrinkage live — and finding that gap is the main reason to run this report at all.

With no completed orders in the period it says “No completed sales” rather than showing a misleading zero.

Cost coverage decides whether to trust the rest

Caution

Cost coverage is not a nice-to-have metric, it is the confidence rating on this whole screen. At 40% coverage, your inventory value is computed from under half your history and the food cost percentage is not a number to make decisions with. The screen tells you how many items are the problem — “17 unvalued items” — so you can go and fix those rather than guess.

Coverage improves by capturing unit cost when stock comes in: on a purchase order line, or on a receiving movement. It is a few seconds per delivery and it is the difference between a report and a guess.

Stock valuation

A per-item table: the item with its average unit cost shown as “$4.20 / kg”, the on-hand quantity, and the resulting value. Items with no cost history show “Cost unavailable” and a dash instead of a value — those are the ones counted in the unvalued total.

Waste analysis

“Recorded waste during the selected period.” Each row is an item with the quantity wasted, the cost, and the number of movements behind it (“6 events”). Nothing recorded shows “No waste movements in this period.”

An empty waste report from a busy kitchen is not good news. It means waste is not being recorded, and that waste is turning up as an unexplained gap between theoretical and actual food cost instead — where you cannot see what caused it.

Export

Export CSV takes the valuation out for a spreadsheet or your accountant. Both tables export: stock valuation as item, category, base unit, on hand, average unit cost and inventory value; waste as item, base unit, quantity, cost and event count. If the export cannot be produced the screen says “Could not export inventory valuation.”

Choosing the period

The From and To dates with Apply control the sales, food cost and waste figures. Inventory value is a snapshot of now and does not move with the dates — it is what is on the shelf today, not what was there in the window.