Help > Units > Unit conversions

As mentioned in the topic titled Units, there are three basic typed of unit used by Resort Chef; Weight, Volume, and Culinary.

Resort Chef knows how to convert from any weight unit to another. For instance the program can automatically convert from pounds to kilograms to ounces to grams, etc., for any ingredient or recipe without any user intervention. Similarly, the program can also automatically convert between any two volume units, say gallons to litres to fluid ounces, etc.

What the program can't do automatically is convert from say a bunch to grams. A bunch of something can weigh just about anything depending on what that something is (celery, parsley, etc.) and just what your idea of a bunch is.

When Resort Chef cannot determine how to convert between two different units, the program asks you to supply a unit conversion factor. The program then saves the conversion factor that you supplied and uses that conversion for that ingredient in the future. In these cases the program displays the Unit Conversion Wizard for you to enter the appropriate conversion factor.

NOTE: Resort Chef will not prompt you for unit conversions if you have disabled them by checking Deferred unit conversions in the Units page of the Database Preferences dialog. More on deferred unit conversions below.

Using a typical example ingredient Apples. You would normally use a unit like pounds when adding apples to a recipe. This is simple enough, but if you purchase your apples by the case, then Resort Chef knows how much a case of apples costs (you will have entered the price per case in the Ingredients dialog), but how does the program determine how much a pound of apples costs? It will need to be able to convert from case units to pounds units.

Say a case of apples weighs 20 pounds, then the conversion is easy, we take the cost per case and divide by 20 to get a cost per pound. But, we can't just assume that a case of just anything will give us 20 pounds of anything. Obviously, we need an 'item specific' unit conversion.

When you initially insert the apples ingredient into a recipe, Resort Chef will look up its table of stored unit conversions (for apples) looking for a way to convert from a known unit (case) to the new unit (pounds). If a conversion is not found, the program will prompt you to supply a conversion factor (How many pounds are there in a case of apples?) with the Unit Conversion Wizard. As previously mentioned, this conversion is saved by the program for future use.

Say, at a later instance, you add 2 kilograms of apples to another recipe, you won't be asked for a unit conversion to get the cost of the 2kg of apples, because the program already knows how to convert from the purchase unit (case) to pounds, and the program can automatically convert from pounds to kilograms as they are weight units, hence the price/kilogram can be calculated without any user intervention.

As you add more recipes to your Resort Chef database, the program will build up a large list of unit conversions, stopping and asking for conversions when required.

When you first start work on a new database, the program will prompt you for unit conversion fairly regularly. As time passes and your database accumulates more and more unit conversion, it will eventually stop asking for them.

NOTE: You cannot manually create unit conversions in the program. Resort Chef will automatically prompt for a unit conversion the first time that the program needs that conversion to calculate a cost. One way to force the program to prompt for all required unit conversions is to perform a Batch Calculation. When performing a batch calculation, the program will recalculate the cost of every ingredient in every recipe and menu, and to do this, the program will require all the necessary unit conversion factors.

Deferred unit conversions

As mentioned above, Resort Chef will normally prompt you when it needs to know a unit conversion factor to convert between two different units.

When you're entering data into a fairly new database, the Unit Conversion Wizard will pop up fairly regularly prompting you for unit conversions. This can get quite annoying when you really want to concentrate on entering raw data into the program.

To circumvent this situation, you can enable deferred unit conversions via the Database Preferences dialog.

When Resort Chef needs a unit conversion factor, and unit conversion deferral is enabled, the program will not display the Unit Conversion Wizard. Instead, the program will create a unit conversion in the database and automatically use a conversion factor of 1.0 (one). It is left to you to manually enter the correct conversion factors at a later time. These can be entered via the Unit Conversion Dialog, the Ingredient dialog - Unit Conversions Page, and the Recipe dialog - Unit Conversion Page.

The three dialogs where you can modify unit conversion details will all show deferred (automatically generated) unit conversion in red to highlight to you that they need updating.

Here's the basic recommended procedure to follow when building up a new database:-

•Enable deferred unit conversions in the Database Preferences dialog (Units page)

•Enter your ingredients and recipes (remembering that the program will not bug you with the Unit Conversion Wizard).

•Run a batch calculation. This will force the program to automatically generate deferred unit conversions for every required pair of units. (The resulting recipe costing details will be incorrect as the program will have used the automatically generated unit conversions, but don't worry about this for the moment, as the costs will be calculated correctly later.)

•Update all your unit conversions entering the correct unit conversion factors. (This is best done via the Unit Conversion dialog.)

•Run the batch calculation again to recalculate the recipe and menu costs using the newly entered (and correct) unit conversion factors.

•Disable deferred unit conversions in the Database Preferences dialog.

NOTE: You can leave deferred unit conversions permanently enabled, if you wish, but you will need to remember to manually check all your unit conversion at regular intervals to update any automatically generated conversions (this is easy enough as all automatically generated unit conversions will appear on screen in red). If you leave deferred unit conversions enabled permanently, Resort Chef will frequently report incorrect recipe costs as they program may be using automatically generated unit conversion factors (1.0). You should regularly check your unit conversions and correct any highlighted (red) conversions and then run a batch calculation to force a recalculation of all recipe and menu costs.