Kitchen Cost Tracker

Kitchen Cost Tracker is a food-cost and operations brain for independent restaurants. Instead of guessing at margins or running spreadsheets at midnight, everything lives in one place and the math is live.

Core modules:

• Ingredients + Recipes + Menu Items — the three-layer recipe engine that computes every plate cost automatically. Change one ingredient price, every recipe and menu item that uses it updates.
• Invoice ingestion — photograph a supplier invoice with your phone, paste one from email, or import a CSV. AI reads every line and updates costs in seconds.
• Inventory counts — track physical counts, purchase deliveries, and on-hand dollar value.
• Daily sales entry — log units sold per menu item per day. Feeds everything below.
• SMS alerts — daily 9 AM text if anything is over target or any ingredient spiked >10% overnight.

Reports + Analysis:

• Dashboard — live KPIs, charts (price trends, inventory composition, food cost by category, supplier spend), and an AI Ops Analyst that runs 8 different guided analyses.
• Reports — biggest price movers, menu items over target, stale ingredients, CSV export.
• AI Ops Analyst — picks apart your data with operator-level recommendations. Every analysis is logged to history and timestamped.

Ops Tools (your biggest margin savers):

• Variance Report (theft & shrink detector) — compares what SHOULD have been used (recipe × units sold) to what was actually purchased. Flags shrink, overportioning, and theft in real dollars. Typical small restaurants find $300–800/month of invisible loss the first time they run it.
• Auto-Generated Purchase Order — projects next 7 days of ingredient usage from your sales trend, subtracts current inventory, adds a par buffer, and produces a supplier-grouped reorder sheet (Sysco, Hardies, Double D). Print or email to vendors. Saves 60–90 min/week.
• Pricing Simulator — slide to a new price, see food cost %, margin/unit, and projected weekly/monthly/annual revenue impact at your current sales volume. One click applies the price to the menu item.
• Catering Quote Builder — client name + headcount + menu items, auto-calculates total food cost, applies a markup multiplier (default 3.5×), shows your gross margin, and prints a client-facing quote PDF with food cost completely hidden.

What makes this different from competing apps:

1. Everything is linked. Update an ingredient price, recipe costs, menu food-cost %, inventory value, and AI recommendations all move in real time.
2. The AI doesn't just describe — it prescribes. Every analysis ends with a specific move and a dollar impact.
3. Variance tracking + pricing simulator together = you can see exactly where margin is leaking AND run "what if I raise this $2" scenarios instantly.
4. No POS integration required. The daily sales entry works off any register or even a handwritten end-of-shift tally.

1. Start on Ingredients. Click SEED DEMO if you want sample brisket data, or + ADD INGREDIENT to enter your first real item (name, category, base unit like oz or lb, cost per unit, yield %, supplier + SKU).
2. Go to Recipes. Click + NEW RECIPE and add ingredients with quantities. Recipes can reference other recipes (sub-recipes) for things like house BBQ sauce or spice rub.
3. Go to Menu Items. Set the price you charge, target food cost %, and add the recipe as a component. The app shows live plate cost and food cost % as a status chip (green/yellow/red).
4. Open the Dashboard. KPIs, charts, and the AI Ops Analyst run automatically.
5. Set your Alert SMS phone in Settings. Daily at 9 AM Central, you get a text if any menu item is over target or any price jumped >10% in 24h.

KPIs (top row): Avg Food Cost %, Menu Items On Target (green), High (over target), Critical (over target +8%), Inventory On Hand ($), Total Menu Items, Ingredients.

AI Ops Analyst: Eight chips, each runs a different analysis. Daily Ops Check is the default 4-sentence summary. Cost Blowouts calls out worst margin losers with suggested prices. Price War Room ranks ingredient inflation. Menu Engineering classifies items into stars/plowhorses/puzzles/dogs. Inventory Health checks days-on-hand vs benchmark. Catering P&L dives into catering margins. 7-Day Forecast projects next week's COGS. BBQ Benchmark compares to industry norms. Every analysis is saved to HISTORY.

Charts: Price trend (top 5 movers), Inventory composition donut, Avg food cost % by menu category, Supplier spend last 30 days.

Menu table: Every menu item with live plate cost, food cost %, and status chip. Sorted worst-first.

Three pulse checks over a 7/30/90 day window:

• Biggest Price Movers — ingredients with the largest cost change, sorted by absolute %. Red = price up, green = price down.
• Menu Items Over Target — items where food cost % exceeds the target you set on that item.
• Stale Prices — ingredients with no cost update in 60+ days. Usually a sign the invoice hasn't been recorded.
• EXPORT CSV — download the current window.

Every raw item you buy. Four ways to update prices:

1. SCAN INVOICE — snap a photo of a Sysco or supplier invoice on your phone. AI vision extracts SKU, quantity, and unit price. Review matches, click APPLY. ~$0.02 per scan.
2. PASTE INVOICE — copy-paste invoice text. Format: SKU DESCRIPTION QTY UNIT_PRICE. Matches on supplier SKU and updates cost, logs history automatically.
3. IMPORT CSV — bulk import or update. CSV columns: name, category, base_unit, cost_per_unit, yield_pct, pack_size, supplier_name, supplier_sku. Only name is required.
4. EDIT — change cost manually on any row.

Price history icon: Click to see a line chart of every cost change over time with total % delta.

Yield %: How much of the raw ingredient is usable. Brisket is ~62% (38% trim/render loss). The app factors yield into recipe costs automatically.

A recipe is any preparation that has ingredients and a yield (servings). Two uses:

• Plated recipes — Brisket Plate, Ribs Plate. These become the backbone of menu items.
• Sub-recipes — House BBQ Sauce, Coleslaw Dressing, Spice Rub. Once costed, any recipe or menu item can use them.

Cost-per-serving updates live whenever any ingredient it uses changes price. Print Recipe Card gives a clean print view for the kitchen wall.

Each row is a dish you sell, with menu price + target food cost %. Add components (recipes or ingredients) and the app computes plate cost live.

Status chip: Green = at or under target. Yellow = HIGH (over target). Red = CRITICAL (over target +8%).

Prep Sheet icon — scale a dish to N plates. Shows plate cost, current menu price + current food cost %, suggested price at your target food cost, margin per plate, total food cost, total revenue. Print it for the prep station.

+ LOG PURCHASE — record a supplier delivery (Sysco, Hardies). Updates the ingredient's current cost and logs to price history. Ledger of all purchases appears below.

NEW COUNT SESSION — physical inventory count. Walk the kitchen, enter on-hand quantity for each ingredient, see live inventory value. Save as draft and return later, or close when done. Closed counts drive the Dashboard KPI.

Benchmark: healthy BBQ inventory = 2–5 days of food cost on hand. Less = risk of running out, more = cash tied up.

• Restaurant Name — shows in headings and SMS alerts.
• Brand Color — hex code, used for buttons and accents.
• Logo URL — optional, appears in headers and printed prep sheets.
• Default Target Food Cost % — fallback target when a menu item doesn't override.
• Alert SMS phone — E.164 format (+15551234567). Daily scan at 9 AM Central texts you if anything is over target or any ingredient price jumped >10% in 24h.
• Test Alert SMS — send yourself a sample alert right now, to confirm the number works.

The AI has live read-only access to: every ingredient, every recipe, every menu item, price history, purchases, inventory counts, and daily food sales. It doesn't make up numbers — if a question can't be answered from your data, it'll say so and tell you what data it needs.

Try asking:

• "If brisket goes up another 10%, which menu items get hurt most?"
• "Which catering SKU is losing me the most money per serving?"
• "Show me the 5 items where a $1 price bump would close 50% of my margin gap."
• "If I drop House BBQ Rub from retail, how much does my total retail margin change?"
• "Which ingredients should I renegotiate with Sysco this month?"

Every analysis is saved to HISTORY. Click HISTORY to scroll back through every question and answer, newest first, collapsed by default.

Log units sold per menu item per day. Three-minute end-of-shift task that unlocks the most valuable features in the app.

How it works:

1. Pick the date (defaults to today).
2. Table shows every active menu item grouped by category. Tab through and enter units sold for each.
3. Live totals at the top: units, revenue, estimated food cost, estimated gross profit.
4. ↩ Copy Yesterday pre-fills with the prior day's numbers — handy if a Tuesday looks like the previous Tuesday.
5. Save writes everything and syncs the daily-totals table.

Why it matters: the AI Ops Analyst (especially Menu Engineering and Cost Blowouts) needs real units-sold to rank items by margin dollars lost, not just food cost %. A plate at 45% FC that sells 5/day is far less important than a plate at 34% FC that sells 200/day. Without this data, the AI is guessing; with it, every recommendation is ranked by real dollar impact.

Also feeds: Variance Report, Purchase Order projection, Pricing Simulator annual impact math, Catering Quote markup calibration.

Four operational tools that sit on top of your cost + sales data. These are where most of the real margin is protected or recovered.

1. Variance Report (theft + shrink detector)

Pick a window (7 / 14 / 30 days). The app:

1. Totals units sold per menu item in that window (from daily sales entry).
2. Walks every recipe and sub-recipe to compute theoretical ingredient usage — e.g. 120 brisket plates × 6 oz per plate = 720 oz of brisket should have been consumed.
3. Compares that against what you actually purchased in the same window.
4. Shows variance in ounces AND dollars per ingredient.

Positive variance (purchased more than recipe says) = shrink, waste, overportioning, theft, or accidentally serving extra. Negative variance = eating into existing inventory (watch for stockouts). The dollar value across all ingredients tells you how much is leaking every week. Typical restaurant: 3–8% variance is normal, >10% means something is wrong.

Real example: recipe says 6 oz brisket per plate, you sold 100 plates (600 oz theoretical), purchases show 780 oz actual — that's 180 oz of leak. At $0.49/oz, that's $88/week. Over a year: $4,600 of untracked loss you now SEE.

2. Auto-Generated Purchase Order

Click Generate Order. The app:

1. Looks at last 7 days of sales.
2. Computes theoretical ingredient needs for the next 7 days (assuming same trend).
3. Subtracts current on-hand (from latest closed inventory count).
4. Adds your par-level buffer (set per ingredient — defaults based on category).
5. Groups the resulting reorder list by supplier, with SKU / pack / quantity / unit cost / line total.

Output has a Print button that gives you a clean print view you can fax / PDF / email to Sysco. Replaces a 60–90 minute weekly chore with a 30-second generate + review.

3. Pricing Simulator

Pick a menu item, slide the price. Live readout shows:

• New food cost % (color-coded green/yellow/red against target).
• Margin per unit (and delta vs current price).
• Projected revenue impact: weekly, monthly, annual — calculated against your actual last-14-days average units sold for that item.
• Apply Price to Menu Item button commits the new price to the database with one click.

Use it when raw costs move: brisket goes up 15%, run the simulator, see what the plate price needs to be to protect margin, apply it. Done in 30 seconds.

4. Catering Quote Builder

Click New Quote. Enter client name, event date, headcount, and markup multiplier (default 3.5× food cost — typical catering margin). Pick menu items and quantities per guest; the app calculates:

• Total food cost (your internal number — hidden from client).
• Client quoted total (food cost × markup).
• Gross margin in $ and %.

Hit Print Client Quote to generate a branded one-page PDF — restaurant name, event details, line items (name + per-guest portion + total portions), grand total, standard catering terms. Food cost is completely omitted from the printed output. Email the PDF, get the deposit, done.

• Food Cost % — plate cost ÷ menu price. Target for full-service BBQ is 28–32%. This is your #1 margin metric.
• Plate cost — what it costs to produce one serving (all ingredients + sub-recipes, yield-adjusted).
• Yield % — edible portion after trim, cooking, and shrink. Brisket yields ~62% of its raw weight after smoking.
• Pack / Pack size — how the supplier ships it (14 lb case, 72 ct case, #10 can).
• Prep sheet — shopping + prep list scaled to N servings. Hand to the kitchen before a shift or catering job.
• Days of inventory on hand — inventory value ÷ average daily food cost. Healthy = 2–5 days.
• Prime cost — food cost + labor cost. Restaurant benchmark: under 60% of sales.
• Variance / Shrink — the gap between what a recipe says should have been used and what actually was. Big gaps point to overportioning, spoilage, theft, or missed invoices.
• Par level — target quantity to keep on hand for each ingredient so you don't run out before the next delivery. Set per-ingredient; drives the Purchase Order math.
• Menu engineering — classifying dishes into Stars / Plowhorses / Puzzles / Dogs based on margin % and volume, so you can promote the right ones and re-engineer the wrong ones.
• Markup multiplier — how many times raw food cost the guest pays. Dine-in: ~3× (33% food cost). Catering: ~3.5–4× (25–30% food cost).
• Margin dollars (not just %) — food cost % matters, but margin $ × units sold is what actually buys payroll. A 45% FC plate that sells 200/week can make more real dollars than a 25% FC plate selling 5/week.
• KPI — Key Performance Indicator. The big summary cards at the top of the Dashboard and Sales tab. Each one is a single headline number: Avg Food Cost %, Menu Items On Target, Inventory On Hand, etc. If you had 30 seconds to check on the restaurant, you'd glance at the KPI row — green is fine, yellow is watch, red is act.

Anywhere you'd be typing a lot, there's now an AI paste box. Paste one line (or dictate with Wispr Flow) — AI fills the whole form.

Invoice OCR + Persistent Mapping Memory

Scan Invoice now rasterizes PDFs page-by-page (no manual conversion). After extraction, every line is either LEARNED (mapped previously — one-click), AI % (first-time line, AI matched to your ingredient list with a confidence score), or ? NEW (pick manually). Click SAVE MAPPINGS — every future invoice from that supplier is instant. LEARNED MAPPINGS button opens the memory admin.

Ingredient Quick-Add

Paste "chicken breast 40lb case $89.50 Sysco SKU 12345" into the purple box at the top of the Ingredient modal. AI fills name, category, base unit, cost-per-unit (computes from pack if needed), yield %, pack size, SKU, supplier. Category auto-defaults yield (Protein 65%, Produce 85%, Dairy 98%, Dry 100%, Seafood 55%).

Recipe Bulk Paste

In the Recipe modal, click PASTE LIST. Paste 6 oz brisket, 2 tbsp rub, 1 cup bbq sauce, 1/2 lb russet potatoes — AI adds every row with unit, qty, and ingredient matched to your master list. Handles fractions ("1/2" → 0.5), unit aliases ("ounce"/"oz"), multi-line or comma-separated.

Menu AI Suggest From Name

Type the menu item name (e.g. "Smoked Brisket Plate") then click AI SUGGEST FROM NAME. AI reads your recipe library and suggests which recipes belong on that plate (protein + sides + sauces) with a reason for each. Check boxes, add.

Sales Daily Tally Paste (Wispr Flow)

Sales tab → PASTE TALLY. Dictate with Wispr Flow: "Brisket 25, Ribs 18, Sausage 12, Tea 40, Cornbread 22". Every quantity field fills in one shot, matched to menu items by name similarity.

Purchase Single-Line Paste

Log Purchase modal's purple box at top: paste Brisket SYS-12345 40lb case 1 $89.50. Ingredient dropdown auto-selects (with confidence %), qty, unit, price, and supplier all fill. Dropdown also autofills unit from the picked ingredient's base_unit.

Pricing Simulator — Hit Target %

New button snaps the slider to the exact price needed for a target food-cost %. Plus preset chips: 25% / 30% / 33% / 35%. No more hunting.

Master Target — Industry Preset Chips

Master Target Simulator now has restaurant-type chips: Fast Casual 30–32%, BBQ 32–36%, Fine Dining 28–32%, Steakhouse 38–42%, Pizza 25–30%, Cafe 18–25%. One click sets the bulk target.

Catering Event Type + Bulk Paste

Event Type dropdown auto-sets markup (Wedding 3.5×, Corporate 2.8×, Fundraiser 2.5×, Reunion 2.2×, Drop-off 2.2×, Full-service 3.5×, Holiday 3.0×, Graduation 2.8×). PASTE ITEMS handles Brisket 1.5, Ribs 1, Sausage 0.5, Tea 2 → all lines added with per-guest qty.

Inventory Pre-Fill From Last Count

New count session auto-pre-fills every ingredient with the on-hand qty from your last CLOSED session. Only edit what changed, save. Toast confirms the source date.

SMS Alert Preview

Settings now shows exactly what the daily alert SMS looks like. Sent 9 AM Central ONLY when an ingredient spikes >10% in 24h or overall food-cost > target. Silent days = everything's fine.

Quickstart Modal

First-visit 3-step guide (Ingredients → Recipes → Menu Items) with jump buttons. Dismisses after you add a few ingredients. Stored in localStorage.

Clickable Dashboard KPI cards

Every KPI card at the top of the Dashboard is now clickable. Click Menu Items On Target, High, or Critical → the menu table below auto-filters to just those items AND the right-side tray opens explaining what the bucket means, the exact math rule (e.g. FC% > target + 8), and a prioritized "what to do in order" list. Avg Food Cost %, Inventory On Hand, Total Menu Items, and Ingredients all open explanation trays too.

Filter pills above the menu table

When you click a KPI, filter pills appear above the menu table: All · Critical · High · On Target. Click any to re-filter without going back to the KPI card. "All" resets.

Blue ? help dots (everywhere)

Every tab, major feature, KPI, and AI tool has a small blue ? icon next to it. Click any dot → a right-side tray slides in with:

• A short, scoped explanation of just that feature (how it works, what to do with it, edge cases).
• An "Ask follow-up about this feature" AI chat at the bottom. Ask "Can I upload PDFs from email?" or "How is days-on-hand calculated?" — AI answers using the article as ground truth + live knowledge of every built feature.
• The chat window expands automatically when you start asking — no more cramped little box.

? HINTS ON / OFF toggle (top bar)

Right next to the USER MANUAL button. Shows ON by default. Click to hide every blue ? dot across the app (for screenshots, demos, or if you've mastered it). Click again to show them. Preference is remembered (localStorage kc_help_icons_visible).