Menu & Inventory joins the dish to the shelf through its recipe. Sell something and the ingredients come off at cost, deliveries put them back through the invoice, and what you made tonight is known tonight — not worked out six weeks later by somebody who wasn't there.
Six tasks · your week
One tap on the till becomes six stock movements and a known cost, in the same instant.
| Negima ×4 · what came off the shelf | Qty | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Chicken thigh | 0.42 kg | £2.52 |
| Spring onion | 0.08 kg | £0.22 |
| Tare glaze | 0.06 L | £0.31 |
| Binchōtan | 0.15 kg | £0.68 |
| Cost to serve · gross margin 91.3% | — | £3.73 |
Sold at £44.00. Costed at £3.73. You have always known roughly what a skewer costs — Hanna knows exactly, on every dish, every night, at today's ingredient prices.
Replaces: costing dishes on a spreadsheet that goes stale in a month
Forward demand, worked back through the recipes to the ingredient, against what is already on the shelf.
Ordered to what you will sell rather than what you sold. The bar is what's on the shelf; the gold mark is what next week needs.
Replaces: a Sunday spent working out what to order
Every line read, matched to what you ordered, and checked against what you last paid.
| Moriya Foods · INV-88214 · 07:12 | Qty | Unit | Line |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken thighmatched to order 1183 | 34 kg | £6.00 | £204.00 |
| Spring onionmatched | 4 kg | £2.80 | £11.20 |
| Tamari, gluten freeup 4.7% on last delivery | 5 L | £8.90 | £44.50 |
| Shiitakematched | 6 kg | £9.20 | £55.20 |
| 9 of 9 lines read · 1 price change flagged | £598.40 |
The tamari rise flows straight through to every dish that uses it. Nine recipes reprice the same morning, and the margin on the gluten-free omakase moves by 0.4 points — visibly, rather than quietly.
Replaces: keying invoices, and missing price rises
Hanna already knows what should be there. You count what is. The gap is priced as you go.
| Count sheet · Sunday 23:40 | Expected | Counted | Variance |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chicken thigh | 8.40 kg | 8.10 kg | − £1.80 |
| Salmon fillet | 3.20 kg | 2.90 kg | − £4.95 |
| Sushi rice | 14.00 kg | 14.00 kg | level |
| Junmai 720ml | 11 | 11 | level |
| Tamari, gluten free | 4.10 L | 4.10 L | level |
| Stock value · variance 0.21% | £3,206.00 | − £6.75 |
You are counting to check the system, not to produce the number. Which is why it takes four minutes rather than a Sunday night — and why a 0.21% variance is a result rather than a mystery.
Replaces: a clipboard and a Sunday night
Food from the recipes, labour from the clock, rent and utilities accrued. A real P&L.
Replaces: waiting six weeks for the accountant
Margin against mix is where everyone starts. What your guests order together is where it gets useful.
| Negima guests take sake 44% of the timea pairing for the menu, not the specials board | 1,240 covers |
| Chirashi earns well, ordered by 2.7% of tablesa description problem, not a dish problem | 46 sold |
| 18% of parties now carry a gluten flagup from 11% a year ago | 307 guests |
Hanna suggests a gluten-free tasting at £68 — costed from recipes you already have at 73% gross margin, using ingredients already on your shelf.
Replaces: guessing, and hoping
The chain
The recipe is the link between what you sell and what you buy. Most restaurants have that link in a chef's head and a spreadsheet, which is why cost of goods is a monthly surprise. Put it in the system once and the entire chain closes.
What the guest orders and what it sells for.
The ingredients and quantities behind that dish. Mapped once, corrected whenever it changes.
The thing you actually buy, in the unit you buy it in, at the price you last paid.
The running position, moved down by sales and up by deliveries without anybody typing.
What the dish cost to serve, tonight, at today's prices rather than last quarter's.
What you need to buy back, and from whom, drafted before you ask.
The model
Perpetual inventory means counting your stock once and then tracking every movement in and out, rather than counting everything again each period to work out what you used. It is how every other industry has run stock for forty years, and it is why Hanna can tell you tonight's food cost tonight.
Count everything at the end of the month. Add up the invoices. Opening stock plus purchases minus closing stock equals what you used. It works, it is honest arithmetic, and it produces one number about six weeks after the decisions that caused it. If the number is bad you cannot tell which week, which dish or which supplier did it.
Count once at the start. After that every sale takes ingredients off through its recipe and every delivery puts them back through its invoice, so the position is always current and every movement is dated, priced and attributable. You still count — weekly on the expensive lines, monthly on the rest — but to check the system rather than to produce the number. When the count disagrees, the disagreement is the finding.
What it asks of you
Everything on this page depends on your recipes being in the system and being right. That is real work, it is the only real work in onboarding, and we would rather tell you now than have you find out in week two.
Send a PDF, or photograph it. Hanna extracts every dish, price and description, and you confirm the list.
A first version of each dish, built from what a kitchen of your type would normally use. Wrong in places, but a starting point rather than a blank sheet.
The part only they can do. Quantities, trim, yield, the substitutions nobody wrote down. This is the day's work.
You never type an ingredient price. The first deliveries set them and every one after keeps them current.
Change a dish and you change one recipe. Everything downstream — cost, stock, ordering, margin — follows without a second entry.
For a menu of forty to sixty dishes, about one working day of your chef's time, spread across a week so it isn't done in one sitting and done badly. Bars are faster; a tasting-menu kitchen with heavy prep is slower.
We do it with you rather than sending a spreadsheet and hoping. And we would rather map thirty dishes properly than sixty roughly — a recipe that is wrong is worse than no recipe, because it produces a number you might act on.
Every figure elsewhere on this site. Dish-level cost and margin, live food cost, stock that maintains itself, ordering drafted from demand, invoices that post themselves, and a menu you can engineer on evidence. None of it is possible without this step, and no system that claims otherwise is telling you the truth.
In detail
All included. No inventory tier, no supplier module, no per-ingredient charge.
A sauce is a recipe used inside other recipes, costed once and updated everywhere. Change the tare and every skewer reprices.
Buy a whole fish, serve fillets. Hanna holds the yield so the cost lands on what you actually served, not what you carried in.
Buy in cases, hold in kilos, use in grams. Conversions are set once per ingredient and then never thought about again.
By storage area, in the order you actually walk the room, with expected values hidden until you've entered yours.
Every difference between expected and counted shown in money, by ingredient, so the conversation is about £6.75 and not about grams.
Emailed to your Hanna address or photographed. Lines extracted, matched to your order, and nothing posts until a human approves it.
A supplier moves a price and the line is flagged before you approve it, with what you last paid beside it.
What you have spent with each supplier, over any period, without opening a folder of paper.
Categories, prices, availability, allergens and translations — one menu behind the till, the QR code and Hanna's answers to guests.
In service
A yakitori counter with heavy prep, a barbecue kitchen and a cocktail bar — three very different stock problems on the same model. Each name here will take your call.
Before you ask
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Send it over before the call and we'll have cost a few of your dishes by the time we speak. It is a faster way to see whether any of this is true than listening to us describe it.
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