Recipes and depletion
A recipe tells the system how much of each pantry item one sold unit of a dish uses. Once a dish has a recipe, selling it depletes the ingredients without anyone recording a movement. The section is labelled Automatic depletion, headed Product recipes.
- Plans
- Signature, Enterprise
- Can it be switched off?
- Yes — an owner or manager can turn it off under Setup → Features.
- Needs first
- Pantry inventory, Menu catalogue. This stays off until all of them are in your plan and switched on.
When stock actually moves
Section titled “When stock actually moves”From the screen’s own description: “Stock is consumed when the order completes and restored if that completion is reversed.”
Two things follow from that, and both matter in a real service:
- An order sitting in Preparing has not depleted anything. Open orders do not reduce your balances, so a busy Friday night looks fully stocked until the tickets close.
- Reversing a completion puts the stock back. You do not have to undo it by hand.
Building a recipe
Section titled “Building a recipe”Catalog → Inventory → Recipes. Choose a menu product, then add ingredients:
| Column | What it is |
|---|---|
| Pantry item | The ingredient. Its base unit is shown in the picker. |
| Applies to | Every sale, a variant option, or an add-on. |
| Qty / sale | How much one sold unit uses, in that item’s base unit. |
| Waste % | Expected loss on top of the quantity. |
Quantities are always in the pantry item’s base unit — “Quantities use each pantry item’s base unit.” There is no unit conversion here, which is another reason to choose base units carefully.
Applies to
Section titled “Applies to”The hint: “Base ingredients apply to every sale. Variant and add-on ingredients apply only when that choice appears on the order.”
So a burger’s bun and patty are Every sale. The extra cheese slice is Add-on: Extra cheese. The larger patty is Size: Large. Only what the guest actually ordered gets depleted.
Waste %
Section titled “Waste %”This is expected, systematic loss — trim on a vegetable, the end of a loaf, pour overshoot on a spirit. Set it and the depletion accounts for it on every sale, which brings your theoretical food cost closer to what you really spend. It is not a place to record spoilage; that is a waste movement.
Saving confirms: “Recipe saved. Future completed orders will use this mapping.” Note future — saving a recipe does not reach back and deplete last week’s orders.
Events needing attention
Section titled “Events needing attention”Depletion runs as a queue of events rather than inline with the sale, so a problem with one ingredient never blocks a guest’s order from closing. Three counters show where things stand:
| Counter | Meaning |
|---|---|
| Recipes configured | How many products have a recipe |
| Events waiting | Queued, not yet processed |
| Events needing attention | Failed |
Failures appear under Depletion events needing attention, each labelled with its order (Order 10244) and the reason, falling back to “The inventory event could not be processed.” when there is no more specific cause. Fix the underlying problem — usually a deleted pantry item or a recipe pointing at nothing — and select Retry.
Where to start
Section titled “Where to start”Do not recipe the whole menu. Start with the five or six items that account for most of your expensive ingredients — the protein dishes and the spirits. That is where a wrong balance costs money, and it is a day’s work rather than a month’s.