How easy life in the kitchen would be if all ingredients came ready to use with no trimming, waste, shrinkage or expansion to worry about. Since that is not the case, CostGuard helps you with these tedious calculations.
AP (As Purchased) is how most items are bought, and that cost is what should be in the Cur Cost field on the main menu. You need this cost there, as this is what you pay your vendors, and you need to price your menu to reflect these costs.
EP (Edible Portion) is what you have left after you prep the item. Some examples of AP/EP conversions include:
Your case of lettuce weighed 50 pounds when it arrived, after you cut off the outer leaves and core, you have 35 pounds left.
Your beef ribeye roast was 22 pounds when delivered, but after you cut off the extra fat, you had 19 pounds left.
Your raw turkey breast weighed 8 pounds before it went into the oven, now after it came out, it weighs 6 ½ pounds.
From your cooked turkey breast, you sliced 100 1-oz portions. Somehow, you “lost” 4 oz in the slicing.
After cooking, the ten pounds of elbow macaroni now weighs close to 18 pounds.
CostGuard calculates this as shrinkage. With the correct shrinkage percentage entered into the program, you can easily calculate how much to buy for a certain number of customers. You can also use this information to cost out your recipes and menus accurately. And, since CostGuard calculates shrinkage for each recipe unit A separate part of the business with its own sales and costs., you can manipulate your usage. For example, dicing fresh tomatoes means little waste, while slicing the same tomato would yield 60% usable product. CostGuard allows you to set up several different units for the same item, each with their own shrinkage rate. To find the individual shrinkage or expansion rate for an inventory item, check the item case, a cookbook, your sales representative, or track before and after weights and measures based on your recipes.
To enter Shrinkage,
Click Inventory, click Inventory Manager. Highlight the item selected and click edit.
Click on Units Tab. Make sure you enter information in the Pack Units and Physical Inventory fields.
If you did not do it before, type in your Recipe Unit for this ingredient.
Move your cursor to the shrinkage field next to the Recipe Unit and type in the amount as a percentage. Using the lettuce example above, 35/50 pounds equals 70% yield or 30% shrinkage. For this example, you would type in 30, and the computer would do the rest. Click the to save.
If an item expands in prepping, you will need to enter a percentage. Using the pasta example from above 18/10 equals an 80% expansion of product. Type in a 180 in the shrinkage field for the program to calculate the increase. Click the to save.