Sample result
AI Costing Spreadsheet Analyzer for Restaurants
The owner asked this:«Here is my costing spreadsheet (42 recipes, 3 sheets). Tell me where it is wrong and which dishes are eating my margin.»
① The sheet audit, before believing anything
The sheet first, the menu second: a flawless analysis built on a broken formula is a lie with formatting.
| Finding | Cell or row | Severity | Proposed fix |
|---|---|---|---|
| Beef loin waste is set to 0% and the real cost lands too low | Recipes!D14 | Breaks the analysis | Declare the waste measured across three butcherings |
| 6 recipes sum with ranges that miss the new rows | Recipes!F22:F27 | Breaks the analysis | Extend the range and lock the totals row |
| The coastal cheese price has not moved since January | Supplies!C31 | Distorts | Stale price: over 90 days with no new date |
| 3 recipes use portions in grams and purchases in kilos, unconverted | Recipes!E8, E19, E33 | Distorts | Unify the unit in the purchase column |
| Sheet «old2» duplicates 11 recipes and skews the averages | whole sheet | Cosmetic | Archive the sheet outside the live workbook |
SUPUESTO: no industry food cost ceiling is hard-coded here. The ceiling used is the one the house declares on its card; until it does, the traffic light compares against the sheet's own historical food cost, and says so. If the real ceiling were 3 points lower, two of the green dishes would turn amber.
② The menu ranked by contribution margin, not by percentage
Reading window: the last 4 weeks of sales, with the real POS mix.
| Dish | Real cost per portion | Menu price | Food cost | Unit margin | Month's margin | Verdict |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Seafood cazuela | $19,800 | $52,000 | 38.1% | $32,200 | 1.9 M | 🔴 reformulate the portion |
| Lomo al trapo | $15,100 | $48,000 | 31.5% | $32,900 | 4.1 M | 🟢 push |
| House rice | $8,900 | $34,000 | 26.2% | $25,100 | 5.6 M | 🟢 push |
| Sea bass in sauce | $16,700 | $46,000 | 36.3% | $29,300 | 1.2 M | 🟡 renegotiate the supply |
The ranking is double on purpose. By percentage the rice would win and the cazuela would lose; by month's margin the rice still wins — but the loin, with a worse percentage than the rice, contributes more money than the cazuela and the sea bass together. With the waste corrected, the month's measured food cost lands 2.5 points above the declared one: that food cost variance is what the sheet was hiding.
The full example has 1 more part(s): you see them inside the library, with your account.