Getting the most out of Resort Restaurant

Regular product costing is one of the most neglected aspects of running foodservice outlets.

The reasons most often cited for not keeping recipe costing up to date using manual methods are:-

•Tedium. Calculating recipe costs for a few hundred recipes is extremely time consuming and tedious.

•Error prone. The rather boring nature of the work ensures that simple errors can creep into the manual calculations giving you misleading results.

•Frequent recalculations required. Daily/weekly fluctuations in ingredient prices mean that recipe costs need to be recalculated regularly in order to keep those costings up to date, which takes us back to tedium (above).

The major benefit of using a program such as Resort Restaurant, is that you create/enter your recipes into the program once and let the program take care of calculating the recipe costs for you. The only maintenance work required from you is to update the ingredient purchase costs in the program as often as you feel is necessary.

1.	Create your ingredient and recipes in the program once.

2.	Update your ingredient purchase costs.

3.	Let the program recalculate your recipe costs.

4.	Print costing reports to review product costs/prices/profits (see note 2 below).

5.	Repeat from step 2 as often as you wish.

It's a remarkably simple procedure to follow and completely removes the tedium of calculating recipe costs by hand.

NOTE 1: One point to keep in mind: It doesn't take the skills or knowledge levels of a chef or manager to enter ingredient costs. This is a task that can be delegated to a relatively junior staff member. Also, you may be able to arrange to receive at least some of your ingredient costs electronically from selected suppliers. You can then use the program's Import Wizard to import those ingredient costs to save even more time.

NOTE 2: One particularly helpful aspect of Resort Restaurant is that the program highlights retail products which fail to meet preset profitability targets. For instance, you might tell the program that you wish to achieve a profitability figure of 26% food cost percentage for retail products. Any products that fail to meet that target value (i.e. their food cost percentage is greater than 26%) are highlighted on screen in red. You can also print a list of these items in the Product Price Exception report. Obviously, these products will need your attention as they aren't as profitable as you wish.

Function/banquet costing

Resort Restaurant has the facility to simplify costing one-off events (functions/banquets) such as weddings, parties, conferences, etc. The program's features let you set up standard (or customized) functions and cost them by simply entering the number of covers (guests).

As for recipes, Resort Restaurant calculates production costs, retail price and profitability figures for functions/banquets. The program also shows cost/price figures for the entire function and on a per/cover basis as well.

When costing a functions, you can cost staff and incidentals such as venue or furniture hire, etc. Just create dummy ingredients for these items and drop them into the function.

Menu Engineering

Resort Restaurant's powerful menu engineering facilities tie all the product (recipe) costing into one place and compares like product against like product for profitability and popularity with your customers.

Menu engineering lets you put some hard numbers against your product sales to review how individual menu items are performing both in terms of profitability and terms of popularity with your customers. Menu engineering can take a while to understand, but it's well worth the effort to get to know and use.

For example, we've had customers using our recipe costing and menu engineering products over the years who have managed to reduce their overall food cost by up to 5 percentage points. Now, these were well run operations to begin with, but the flexibility offered by our products has let these businesses improve their bottom lines significantly. What would it be worth to you to reduce your costs by even 3 percentage points?

See the following topics for more details on menu engineering:-

•What is Menu Engineering?

•How can I make Menu Engineering work for me?

•How do I interpret a menu engineering graph?