You may find, from time to time, that some of your recipe costs look a little strange. The costs may be much larger or much smaller than you expected.
This may because of errors in data entry. It's very easy to make a simple mistake when editing recipes and end up with completely incorrect recipe costings.
One common mistake we regularly see is the use of incorrect units in the recipe ingredient list. For example, say a recipe requires 100 grams of an expensive ingredient like Caviar. Now, if the person entering the caviar into the recipe accidentally inserts 100 kilograms instead of 100 grams, the cost of the recipe is going to go through the roof.
Another common error is to enter incorrect conversion factors for unit conversions. For example say the program asks 'How many cases of lettuce in a kilograms of lettuce?' and the user erroneously enters 10 instead of 0.1 (they were probably thinking there are 10kilograms of lettuce in a case, but failed to invert the number before entering it into the program. In this instance, for any recipes using lettuce, the cost of the lettuce would be out by a factor of 100.
Here's a general checklist of things to look for when de-bugging or trouble shooting erroneous recipe costs:-
| 1. | In the Component Ingredient page of the Recipe dialog, look at the cost of the recipe. Does it look way too big or way too small? If so, then it's time to do some investigating. |
| 2. | In the recipe's ingredient list, scroll to the far right hand side of the list and look at the individual ingredient costs. At least one, and maybe more, ingredients will have costs that just don't look right. I.e. if the entry for lettuce costs $85000 you know you have a problem. |
| 3. | Look at the quantity and unit for the ingredient in the recipe. Do they look OK? |
| 4. | Double click the ingredient to display the Ingredient dialog. Look at the ingredient's purchase price. Does that look OK, or make sense? It's easy enough to change the purchase unit for an ingredient without adjusting it's price to suit the new unit value. |
| 5. | Click the unit conversions tab in the Ingredient dialog. Do all of the unit conversion factors look OK? |
| 6. | If you make any changes, return to the original recipe (Recipe dialog) and click the  button in the Component Ingredient page. This will force Resort Chef to fully recalculate the cost of the recipe using whatever values you changes and update the displayed costs. |
| 7. | Does you recipe cost now look more reasonable? If not go back to step 2 and repeat until the recipe cost looks more realistic. |