Cost Report

What it does

The Cost Report (Reports → Cost Report) shows what your stock actually cost to sell over a period — cost of sales, waste, and (once a dish has both a recipe and a matched sale) gross margin — by menu item and by product. It reads straight from your Inventory ledger, so every figure is priced at what you actually paid for that batch, not an average or a guess. See Reports Overview for the shared date range and Apply controls this report also uses. It's the sales-side twin of Food Cost, which prices a dish before it sells; this report shows what dishes actually cost once they have.

Tabs and parameters

Above the tabs, four totals summarise the whole period: cost of sales, waste, stock returned by refunds, and gross margin (shown once anything in the range has both a recipe and a matched sale). Parameters: date range only — there's no granularity option, because the totals are a single sum over the period rather than a series through it.

• By Menu Item — ranks your dishes and modifiers by what they cost to sell, with how many times sold, cost, revenue (when matched to a sale), and margin %. The chart shows only the dozen priciest rows; the table underneath has all of them and sorts by any column.
• By Product — what each ingredient cost to consume and to waste over the period, in its own unit, with the same chart-plus-table layout.

Key things to know

• Every figure here is priced at what a delivery actually cost, drawn lot by lot from the ledger — never an average across the period.
• Waste is kept separate from cost of sales on purpose. Cost of sales is stock that went out through a recipe; waste is stock you lost. One is the cost of doing business, the other a problem worth acting on.
• Refunds are already netted out of cost of sales rather than shown as a separate loss, because a refunded dish was never really sold.
• Gross margin only covers dishes that have both a recipe and a matched sale. A dish sold without a recipe has revenue and no known cost, and folding it in would overstate the margin — see Recipes.
• Sizes and other variants are rolled into their parent item on the By Menu Item tab, because sales aren't reported per variant. An item shown with a cost but "No matching sale" sold under a different name than its recipe, or didn't sell in this range at all — its cost still counts, it just has no margin.
• This report has no PDF export yet, unlike the other four report pages.
• Anyone who can view Inventory or Reports can open this page — there's no separate permission for it.

FAQ

Q: Where did the Cost report go? I used to find it under Inventory.
A: It moved to Reports → Cost Report. What it shows hasn't changed — old links to its Inventory page still work and land here.

Q: Why does a dish show a cost but no revenue?
A: Nothing sold under that menu item in the period you picked — or it sold under a different item than the one the recipe is attached to. Its cost is still counted; margin just needs both halves.

Q: Why is my gross margin calculated on fewer dishes than I actually sold?
A: Margin only covers dishes that have both a recipe and a matched sale. Anything sold without a recipe has revenue but no known cost, and including it would overstate the margin. Add recipes to more items to widen the coverage — see Recipes.

Q: Where's the revenue for individual sizes?
A: Sizes and other variants are rolled up into their parent item here, because sales aren't reported per variant. Splitting them out would show a large portion's cost with no revenue beside it, which reads as a loss.

Q: Is waste included in cost of sales?
A: No — it's shown as its own figure so the two stay distinguishable. Cost of sales is what recipes deducted through sales; waste is what you lost outright.

Q: A dish was refunded. Does its cost still count?
A: No. Refunds net out of cost of sales rather than showing as a separate loss, because the dish wasn't really sold.

Q: Can I download this report as a PDF?
A: Not yet — it's the one report page without a PDF export. Everything else about it works the same as the other reports: the date range, the tabs, the tables.