Learn how PurchasePlus helps your Organization to manage Recipes.
Jump to:
- Introduction
- Recipe Permissions
- Viewing and Managing Recipes
- Printing a Recipe
- Creating a New Recipe
- Costing a Recipe
Introduction
Recipes is an optional inclusion in your PurchasePlus system, and it is a great way to leverage even more value from our software in addition to our best-in-class Procure-to-Pay offering.
Our Recipes module enables Purchasers to:
- Centralise and standardise your Food and Beverage teams’ Intellectual Property,
- Achieve close control over the cost of your Recipes and Ingredients, and ultimately,
- Maximise Recipe and Menu profitability.
If your Organization has enabled Recipes, then the [Recipes] area will be available in the side navigation bar:
What is a Recipe?
In PurchasePlus terminology, a Recipe is a list of Ingredients, in specific Portions, that can be Prepared and Presented by your Food and Beverage teams, according to the procedures saved against the Recipe.
Each Ingredient in a Recipe is a Product that can be purchased from your Suppliers on PurchasePlus. A Recipe can also actually contain another Recipe as an Ingredient too, and these special Ingredients are called ‘Recipe Items’. For example, you may have one Recipe for making Spaghetti pasta, and the Spaghetti pasta 'Recipe Item' can be included in your Spaghetti Bolognese Recipe.
Recipes in turn can be added to one or more Menus, giving us a hierarchy like so:
- Your Organization can have one or more
- Menus, can have one or more
- Recipes, can have one or more
- Ingredients, which can have one or more
- Substitutes,
- Barcodes,
- And coming soon, Stock Locations, to keep track of the Inventory level of an Ingredient kept as a Stock Item.
- Ingredients, which can have one or more
- Recipes, can have one or more
- Menus, can have one or more
Recipe Permissions
A user’s ability to Manage Recipes (i.e. create, update, delete a Recipe) is controlled by the Permission: ‘Manage Recipes.’ Please contact a PurchasePlus administrator at your Organization if you wish to have this permission enabled for your user profile.
Viewing and Managing Your Recipes
You can find the list of Recipes that are available to your Organization in the Side Navigation bar by clicking [Recipes] → [View All]. Here you will find all of your Recipes and their attributes in a table view. You can customize the table using the ‘Manage Columns’ button, or dragging the column width borders to suit your preference.
From this view, you can also Add a Recipe to a Menu and Delete a Recipe, using the More menu on the right hand side of the table.
Recipe Ingredients View & Settings
Clicking on any Recipe Name from the table view will take you inside the Recipe. From this view, users with the ‘Manage Recipes’ permission can Add, Edit or Remove the Recipe’s Ingredients (including the portions thereof), and update the Settings of the Recipe - for example, change the Recipe name, or change the Sell Price of the Recipe.
Recipe Card View
Clicking on the [View] button in the Recipe Card column of the table will take the user a full screen, mobile device and printer-friendly version of the Recipe. You cannot add, edit or remove Ingredients from the Recipe in this view, but you can write and save Preparation and Presentation notes against the Recipe that other users in your Organization can refer to when cooking this Recipe.
Printing a Recipe
There is a [Print] button in the header of both the Recipe Ingredients view and the Recipe Card view:
Clicking the Print Recipe button will generate a print-friendly version of the page, including Ingredients, Portions, Preparation and Presentation instructions:
A print dialog box will appear and you will be able to send the page to the printer.
Creating New Recipes
You can create a Recipe by clicking the [Create New Recipe] button on the [Recipes] → [View All] page or by clicking [Recipes] → [New Recipe].
You will first be prompted to provide some basic information about the Recipe, before clicking [Create Recipe] at the bottom of the page:
After clicking [Create Recipe], the next screen will be the Recipe Ingredients view, where you can begin adding Ingredients to the Recipe.
Adding Ingredients to a Recipe
On the Recipe Ingredients screen, you can click [Add Ingredients]:
This will display a window where you can search for Ingredients to add to the Recipe. You can also use [Advanced Search], if you would like to search by Product Code, Filter by Category, and more options:
Once you have found your desired Ingredient, you can specify the Portion required for the Recipe. The Unit of Measure is taken directly from the Ingredient that your organisation purchases from Suppliers. The Portion that you enter in this field can be a whole number (e.g. 2kg) or a fraction (e.g. 0.25 of a Capsicum, as in the image below).
Once you have defined the Portion of the Ingredient to add to the Recipe, click [Add Ingredient]:
Troubleshooting: I can't find the Ingredient I am looking for.
If you cannot find the Ingredient you are searching for, you may need to create a new Ingredient first. Or, if the Ingredient is an existing Product that is owned by your Supplier, you may need to Clone the Product to create a version of that Product that is owned by your Organisation (and can thus be used as an Ingredient).
Troubleshooting: My Ingredients don't have cost values.
Because Ingredients must be Products owned by your organisation (i.e. you cannot directly add a Supplier-owned Product into a Recipe), there are two ways to get quotes against an Ingredient to drive Cost information:
- Add the Ingredient to a Self-Managed Catalog that is assigned to one of your Suppliers,
- Ask our Catalogs Team to match an Ingredient to a Master Product, and then get quotes from your Suppliers on that Master Product. Get in touch with our Catalogs Team.
Costing a Recipe
You can understand important financial details about your Recipes in either the Table view or the Information panel of a Recipe, such as:
- Yield: The number of servings (‘units’) that are produced by the Recipe.
- Cost Price: The cost price per unit of the Recipe, based on the Best Price from your Suppliers on each Ingredient (if available), and multiplied by the Portion of each Ingredient. Learn more about costing Ingredients.
- Stocked Price: The Average Unit Value of the Stock Item multiplied by the Portion. This field is only available if your Organization has enabled the Inventory module, and the Stock Item has had a Unit Value added to it.
- Sale Price: The price that a unit is sold for.
- Cost %: The percentage of the Cost Price of the Recipe, relative to the Sale Price.
Re-calculating Recipe Costs
PurchasePlus is the platform of choice for many organisations who wish to manage their Recipes in the same platform as their Purchasing and Inventory management needs. To maintain high system performance, we do not update Recipe costs in real-time, as to do so for every Recipe in our system would affect performance.
If you have made a change to a Recipe and you are expecting:
- Ingredient Costs to change,
- Additional Supplier Quotes to appear on an Ingredient,
You can click [Recalculate Recipe Costs] in the Recipe Header to forcefully re-source quotes and re-calculate the costs for the Recipe you are viewing:
Alternatively, our software automatically Recalculates the costs for every Recipe once per night (during periods of low system activity). This may be helpful in the event that re-calculating every Recipe's cost manually is not suitable for your needs.
Troubleshooting: My Recipe does not have a Cost.
Recipe Costs are calculated by adding all of the Ingredient Costs together.
Therefore, for a Recipe to have a Cost, all of its Ingredients must have a Cost. Learn more about Ingredient Costs.
This is Part 1 of our Introduction to Recipes series.
How do I start using the Recipes Module?
If your Organization would like to begin using the PurchasePlus Recipes module, please contact your Account Manager or our friendly Customer Success Team for assistance with enabling the module, and to organize training for your users (if required).
Note for Purchasers using Legacy PurchasePlus
The Recipes module in New PurchasePlus has been redesigned and reengineered, and it is materially different to the Legacy PurchasePlus Recipes Module. Purchasers migrating from our Legacy PurchasePlus platform to our New PurchasePlus platform will need additional migration support to begin using Recipes, as Recipe, Menu and Ingredient data in our legacy PurchasePlus platform is not automatically available in our New PurchasePlus platform.