Recipe costing software that recosts itself

Every dish costed from live stock prices, GP worked out on the price excluding VAT, and allergens tagged against the fourteen with a chart you can print per site — so a supplier price rise moves your margin on screen instead of at year end.

14-day free trial, no credit card. Or cost one dish right now with the free GP calculator — no account needed.

A dish costing is true on the day you write it

The spreadsheet costing that told you a dish ran at seventy-two per cent GP was accurate in March. Then butter went up, the fish supplier changed, portion sizes drifted at the pass, and nobody rebuilt the sheet because rebuilding it means opening forty tabs and re-entering prices from invoices. The menu you are selling today has a margin nobody has actually measured, and the first time anyone notices is when the accounts come back thinner than expected.

Zynthio takes the price out of the recipe and puts it in stock. An ingredient links to a stock product and inherits the preferred supplier price, with case prices converted down to the unit, so there is no price field on a recipe to go stale. Change what you pay for butter once and every dish that uses it recosts, including the dishes that use it three layers down inside a sauce.

What you stop doing

From the ingredient to the pass

Costing from live prices, with a waste factor

Ingredient costs come from the linked stock product's preferred supplier price. Each ingredient can carry a waste factor — five per cent for trim on a whole fish, for instance — so the saved cost reflects what actually reaches the plate rather than what came through the door. Because prices are inherited rather than typed, the recipe screen shows how many ingredients are linked and how many are not, which matters: an unlinked ingredient contributes nothing, so a partly linked recipe reports a real-looking cost that is simply too low. Ingredient mapping links them in bulk with fuzzy name matching rather than one at a time.

GP worked out the way HMRC would

Food cost percentage is the portion cost divided by the menu price excluding VAT. The price you enter is treated as VAT-inclusive for one portion and the standard rate is stripped before the margin is calculated, which is the correct UK convention and the place most hand-built costings go wrong by a distance that matters. If you want to sanity-check a single dish, price to a target GP, or work out what a keg delivers by the pint without logging in, the free Zynthio GP calculator does all of that in the browser, VAT handled properly, no account needed. Log in and it will save your calculations too.

Sub-recipes that cost and carry through

A recipe is a dish, a prep item or a batch, and recipes contain other recipes. A lasagne sits on a ragu and a bechamel that are each costed and each allergen-assessed once, and the child's cost per yield unit is what the parent uses. That is how a stock reduction, a house dressing or a batch of pasta dough stops being retyped into every dish that uses it — and how a price change on one ingredient reaches every dish above it. A circular reference returns no cost rather than looping. Recipes sit in books that attach to sites, so a group can hold one master collection and site-specific dishes side by side.

Allergen tagging with three states, not two

Every dish is assessed against the fourteen UK named allergens as contains, free from, or not assessed — and that third state is the important one, because a blank cell on a paper matrix reads as "free from" to whoever is holding it at the pass. An assessment needs either a named allergen or an explicit confirmation that the dish is free from all fourteen; ticking nothing is not an assessment and Zynthio will not treat it as one. Allergens can be declared by you, inherited from sub-recipes, or detected from ingredient names as a prompt only. A dish is fully assessed only when everything underneath it is, and the assessment lapses when the ingredients change.

An allergen chart you can print per site

The allergen chart prints to PDF with the site name in the heading and carries a count of how many dishes have not been assessed, so the gap is on the document rather than hidden by it. Unassessed dishes print as "not assessed — check with the kitchen before serving". Two honest limits: there is no "may contain" and no cross-contamination handling anywhere in the module, and keyword detection deliberately over-reports, suggesting eggs for aubergine and nuts for brazil. That failure direction is the safe one, and it is a prompt for a human rather than a decision.

Recipes that deplete stock when the dish sells

Map a recipe to a till item and selling the dish depletes its leaf ingredients with proper unit conversion, so a glass comes off a bottle as a measure rather than as a bottle. Mapping is suggested by name similarity rather than built by hand, and a site-specific recipe wins over an organisation-wide one on that site's till. One rule worth knowing: a recipe only depletes stock once its cost has been calculated at least once, which is another reason to link the ingredients properly first.

A recipe book is the middle of a chain

Prices come in from one side, sales pull from the other, and the allergen data lands in front of a guest. All three live here.

Stock & Back Office

Supplier prices, case-to-unit conversion and ingredient mapping. Change a price once and every dish above it recosts.

EPOS & Till

Recipe-to-EPOS mapping turns a sale into a stock movement, with site-specific recipes overriding the org-wide version.

Food Safety & HACCP

The allergen chart sits alongside your daily checks, HACCP plan and EHO pack, produced against the same sites.

Pricing. Recipes with allergen tagging is one of the nine modules in Core at £59 per site per month. Ingredient costs are inherited from stock products, so full automatic costing needs the EPOS & Stock add-on at £49 per site per month; the recipe book, allergen assessment and printable chart do not. Annual billing gives you two months free. See the full pricing page, or try the free GP calculator first.

Recipe costing and allergen questions

How is gross profit calculated?

Portion cost divided by the menu price excluding VAT. The menu price you enter is treated as VAT-inclusive for one portion and the standard rate is stripped out before the margin is worked out, which is the correct UK convention and the single most common place a menu goes wrong. If you want to check one dish or one keg right now without an account, the free GP calculator does it in the browser and handles UK VAT properly.

Where do ingredient prices come from?

From stock. A recipe ingredient links to a stock product and takes the preferred supplier price, with a case price converted down to the unit, so there is no manual price field to go stale. That has one consequence worth stating plainly: an unlinked ingredient contributes nothing to the cost, so a partly linked recipe reports a real-looking cost that is simply too low. The recipe screen shows linked and unlinked counts for exactly that reason, and ingredient mapping does the linking in bulk with fuzzy name matching.

Do sub-recipes cost through?

Yes. A recipe can be a dish, a prep item or a batch, and recipes can contain other recipes, so a lasagne is built on a costed, allergen-assessed ragu and bechamel rather than on a list of raw ingredients typed out again. The child recipe's cost per yield unit is used by the parent. A circular reference returns no cost rather than looping forever.

How does allergen tagging work?

Against the fourteen UK named allergens, and with three states rather than two: contains, free from, and not assessed. An assessment needs either a named allergen or an explicit confirmation that the dish is free from all fourteen, so saving a recipe with nothing ticked is not an assessment and is not treated as one. Allergens can be declared, detected from ingredient names as a prompt only, or inherited from sub-recipes, and a dish is only fully assessed when every sub-recipe under it is assessed too. The assessment lapses when the ingredients change.

Can I print an allergen chart?

Yes. The allergen chart prints to PDF and can be produced per site with the site name in the heading, and it carries a count of how many of your dishes have not yet been assessed. An unassessed dish prints as "not assessed, check with the kitchen before serving" rather than as a blank cell, because a blank cell reads as "free from" to whoever is holding the chart at the pass.

One login, one bill, one set of sites

Every Zynthio module shares the same sites, the same people and the same reporting. Turn on what you need.

Martyn’s Law Readiness

Procedure templates, a per-site capacity and tier view, a quarterly drill record and a staff briefing.

Zero-Hours Readiness

Guaranteed hours, shift notice and cancellation payment policies, plus the rota record that evidences them.

Digital daily checks, temperature logs, HACCP plans, allergen charts and EHO-ready PDF records.

Rotas, Clock-In & HR

Build rotas against a live labour budget, clock staff in with geofencing, approve timesheets.

Stock & Cashing Up

Stocktakes, purchase orders, delivery scanning, GP tracking and daily cashups with weekly rollups.

Connect your existing till for live sales into stock and rotas, plus the ZynthioEPOS till in build.

HACCP Plans

Build a full Codex HACCP plan online, link CCPs to daily checks and export EHO-ready PDFs.

COSHH & Risk Assessments

Substance register with data sheets and PPE, plus scored venue risk assessments with sign-off.

Audits & Mock EHO

Ten UK templates, 400+ inspector-style questions, weighted scoring and a site league table.

Staff Training

Assign courses, track completion by person and site, and issue certificates into the HR file.

Review Management

Google, TripAdvisor and your FSA rating in one dashboard with a reputation score per site.

Table Bookings

Website booking widget, live service diary, deposits and a guest CRM - no per-cover fees, ever.

Refusals Register

A digital refusals book filled from the till, ready for the licensing officer.

Cash Management

Safes, floats, banking and an append-only ledger with daily cash-up reconciliation.

Accounting Export

The daily sales journal, supplier bills and payroll journal in Xero’s own import layouts.

KPIs & Reporting

Clock-in accuracy, labour budget, salary utilisation and reputation, per site and per group.

Free GP Calculator

Cost a dish, cost a keg by the pint, or price to a target GP. No account needed, VAT handled properly.

Or start at the beginning on the Zynthio homepage, try it with sample data on the live demo, or read practical operator guides on the blog.

Find out what your menu really makes

Cost one dish free in the GP calculator, or start a 14-day trial with no card and bring the whole book across.