Actual vs Theoretical Food Cost Variance Analyzer

About the Actual vs Theoretical Food Cost Variance Analyzer

Theoretical food cost is what your food should have cost for what you sold, following your recipes; actual food cost is what you used. The gap between them is where money leaks: waste nobody wrote down, portions bigger than the recipe, staff meals or comps not rung up, theft, missing invoices or sales not recorded.

Bring in the period’s opening and closing stock counts, the purchases from your invoices, the item sales report of your point-of-sale system and the recipes (from a CSV or the Recipe Costing & Menu Pricing Studio), and, if you keep one, the waste log. For every ingredient the analyzer works out the actual usage (opening + purchases − closing), the theoretical usage (items sold × the recipes), the waste logged and the unexplained variance — in quantity, value and share of sales — then the period’s actual and theoretical food cost % and the biggest leaks to look at. Units convert per ingredient; items sold with no recipe and quantities that cannot be converted are listed, never guessed.

Without a pass the report is a free preview: the period summary in full and the first rows of the variance table and of the leaks; the full table and its CSV and Excel files unlock with a Premium pass.

Common uses

• A weekly or monthly food cost review in a restaurant, café, cloud kitchen or canteen.
• Finding which ingredient explains a food cost % that is higher than the menu’s plan.
• Checking a new portion standard or a change of supplier after a few weeks.
• An owner reviewing a kitchen they do not run day to day.

How the figures are worked out

• Actual usage of an ingredient = opening stock + purchases − closing stock.
• Theoretical usage = Σ items sold × the ingredient in one portion of each recipe (as bought: with a trim yield the stock taken is the recipe quantity ÷ the yield).
• Variance = actual − theoretical; unexplained = variance − the waste logged.
• Value = quantity × the ingredient’s unit cost: the weighted average cost of the period’s purchases, or the unit cost of the counts when nothing was bought.
• Cost of food sold for the period = opening stock value + purchases − closing stock value (Dopson and Hayes, Food and Beverage Cost Control). Food cost % = cost ÷ food sales × 100, actual and theoretical.

Reading a variance

• More used than the recipes say (positive): portions bigger than the recipe, waste not logged, staff meals, tastings and comps not rung up, items sold but not recorded, theft. Check portions first: they are the most common cause.
• Less used than the recipes say (negative): a recipe quantity set too high, a delivery counted but not yet invoiced, or a counting mistake.
• Used, but in no recipe: a missing recipe, staff meals, or an item sold under another name.
• More in stock than there could be: a missing invoice, or a counting error at the start or the end.
• A small variance on a cheap ingredient matters less than a small one on the most expensive: the leaks are sorted by value.

Getting good counts

Count at the same time of day at the start and the end, before deliveries are put away, in the same units each time; count open packs by weight. Keep invoices and credit notes of the period together: a return or a credit note goes in the purchases as a line below zero (−2 kg costing −24). The Stock Take & Physical Count Variance Report helps run the count itself, and the Recipe Costing Studio keeps recipes with yields that already include trimming.

Limitations

• It is only as good as the counts, invoices, sales and recipes you bring in; it cannot see what was never recorded.
• Names must match across the files: case, punctuation and regular plurals (onions, tomatoes, berries) do not matter, irregular ones (leaves, loaves) do; the tool lists the names that do not match, for you to match.
• Quantities in different kinds of unit (cups and kilograms, pieces and grams) convert only with a density or piece weight, which recipes from the Recipe Costing Studio carry.
• In files, a bare “pint”, “quart”, “gallon” or “fl oz” is read as the US unit in the United States and the imperial one in the United Kingdom (a US pint is 473 ml, a UK pint 568 ml); elsewhere write “US pint” or “UK pint”. A bare “cup” is the US cup in the United States and the 250 ml metric cup everywhere else; in Australia a bare “tbsp” is the 20 ml Australian tablespoon.
• Recipes are taken as one portion each; items sold in several sizes need one recipe per size.
• Values exclude ingredients with no unit cost; the tool says which.

Privacy

On this device; its files download once

Everything happens in your browser. What you enter or open here is not uploaded or stored by MySmartCoPilot. Downloads the spreadsheet reader and writer from this site the first time you open an Excel file or download the workbook; your counts, invoices and sales never leave this browser.