Who is this assistant for?

You order "the usual" and some weeks product is left over and others the dish runs out. You know what you pay per kilo, but not what the served portion costs you. On Sunday lunch your star dish runs out by two in the afternoon. You changed supplier and the meat yields differently, but the order stayed the same.

Between what the supplier invoices and what leaves the window there are two kinds of waste and a rounding, and almost no restaurant has them written down. This assistant runs the arithmetic both ways: how many portions come out of today's purchase and how much to buy for Saturday's service, using a yield factor measured in your own kitchen. The result is not trivia: it is Thursday's order, rounded to the case they sell you and with cost per portion recalculated.

AI assistant · N5 Complete system

◆ Included in the annual plan👨‍🍳 Standard Recipes, Spec Sheets and Productionv1.0.0 · 2026-08-26

📊 Works best with an AI that reads Excel or Sheets (Claude for Excel, ChatGPT, Copilot in Microsoft 365) · optional

Portion Calculator for Restaurants

Turns the kilo you bought into real portions and Saturday's demand into a purchase list, using a yield factor weighed in your own kitchen instead of copied from someone else's table.

Depth

8/23

Your data

Compatible AIs

Steps to use it

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◀ Put out today's fireRun the year ▶

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N5Complete system

Several chained pieces you install and operate over time, with their review cadence. It changes how the business runs, not one decision.

◆ This assistant 110 of the 164 published assistants are at this level

Is this for you?

What it does and what you get

Between what the supplier invoices and what leaves the window there are two kinds of waste and a rounding, and almost no restaurant has them written down.
This assistant runs the arithmetic both ways: how many portions come out of today's purchase and how much to buy for Saturday's service, using a yield factor measured in your own kitchen.
The result is not trivia: it is Thursday's order, rounded to the case they sell you and with cost per portion recalculated.

What you end up with

A yield table with the measured factor and cost per portion; the portion forecast by dish and by channel with its cushion; the purchase list per service and per location rounded to the supplier's unit; and the weighing template to repeat the calculation.

EXAMPLE This is what you getAn example built with Sazón de Origen, the house's fictional restaurant.Not your data: your result is built with YOUR restaurant's.See the full example →

Sample result

Sazón de OrigenFictional contemporary Colombian restaurant in Medellín, 2 locations, 6 years in business. Every sample result in the library comes from this same case. Fictional restaurant

The owner asked this: «Beef round is sold to me in 6 kg cases and trout by the piece. Last Sunday the sancocho ran out at 1:40 and on Tuesday I binned 3 kg of round that had turned. I need to know how many portions each purchase really gives me and how much to order for Sunday, across both locations.»

Three items weighed in the kitchen, not estimated. Purchase, trimmed, servable — and the portions left at the end of that chain.

Item	Purchase weight	Trimmed weight	Servable weight	Factor	Spec gram weight	Real portions	Cost per portion
Beef round (Bandeja)	6.00 kg (1 case)	5.28 kg	4.42 kg	0.74	120 g	36	$6,333
Three-meat mix (Sancocho)	8.00 kg	6.90 kg	5.52 kg	0.69	260 g	21	$9,143
Whole trout (10 pieces of 550 g)	5.50 kg	3.19 kg	3.08 kg	0.56	220 g	14	$12,179

The naive arithmetic is off by a third. Dividing 6,000 g by 120 g gives 50 portions of round, and the scale says 36. Fourteen portions of difference on a single case: that is what gets under-ordered when the order is built on invoice weight instead of servable weight. On trout the gap is worse —25 against 14— which is why it is the expensive dish that runs out on Sunday, not the cheap one.

SUPUESTO: the three factors come from a weighing done in Sazón de Origen's own kitchen, not from an industry yield table, which shifts by cut, by supplier and by country. If the round supplier starts sending a fattier cut and the factor drops from 0.74 to 0.68, each case goes from 36 to 33 portions and Sunday's order rises by a full case. That is why the factor is re-weighed every month and every time the supplier changes: it is not a filing-cabinet number, it is a number that expires.

214 covers forecast across both locations for Sunday lunch, split with the sales mix of the last 8 weeks.

Dish	Channel	Expected portions	Cushion	Total to produce
Bandeja de la casa	Dining room	45	3	48
Bandeja de la casa	Own delivery	19	1	20
Bandeja de la casa	Platform	9	0	9
Sancocho de tres carnes	Dining room	29	4	33
Sancocho de tres carnes	Own delivery	12	2	14
Sancocho de tres carnes	Platform	6	0	6
Trucha al ajillo	Dining room	17	2	19
Trucha al ajillo	Own delivery	5	0	5
Trucha al ajillo	Platform	2	0	2

The cushion is not spread evenly, and that is this block's decision. The sancocho carries 6 because it is the one that ran out, and being without it on a Sunday costs the contribution margin of 6 plates plus the face of the guest who came for it. The trout carries 2: every spare portion is $12,179 heading for the walk-in and from there to the bin, because portioned fillet does not survive to Tuesday. And the platform carries no cushion on any dish — if it sells out, the item is switched off in the app and nothing happens; in the dining room, switching an item off means saying no to somebody already seated.

The arithmetic reversed: portions × gram weight ÷ factor, then rounded to the unit the supplier invoices. The rounding is the part that eats the saving.

Dish	Portions to produce	Servable weight	Purchase weight	Supplier unit	Order
Bandeja de la casa	77	9.24 kg	12.49 kg	6 kg case	2 cases (12 kg)
Sancocho de tres carnes	53	13.78 kg	19.97 kg	Loose kilo	20 kg
Trucha al ajillo	26	5.72 kg	10.21 kg	550 g piece	19 pieces

On the bandeja the rounding forces a choice, and the choice gets written down. 12.49 kg are needed and the case is 6 kg: two cases leave you 3 portions short, three cases leave 5.51 kg standing, which at $38,000 a kilo is $209,000 waiting for the week to use it. Two cases are ordered and the 3 portions come out of the dining room cushion, which was set at 3 for exactly this. The other way out is negotiating half a case with the supplier, and that is a purchasing conversation, not a kitchen one.

Dish	Cost per portion before	With the measured yield	Dish food cost
Bandeja de la casa	$6,240	$6,333	31.8%
Sancocho de tres carnes	$9,100	$9,143	31.5%
Trucha al ajillo	$12,100	$12,179	31.2%

All three stay under the 32% set by the house costing rule, and that is the uncomfortable finding: weighing the yield barely moved the food cost — it moved the order. The error was never in the cost of the dish, it was in the quantity coming through the back door.

Illustrative example generated with a fictional restaurant. Not a promise of results, not a client case.

This is 3 of 4 parts. Behind the wall is **the machinery that makes this repeat itself**: the weighing template for the seven items still missing, the cushion worked out with a number —what selling out is worth against what binning is worth, dish by dish—, the indicator every 7 days with its acceptable range, and **the supplier-change protocol**, which says what gets re-weighed before the first invoice is accepted.

See the full example — free account

Works with these AIs

Claude — the best for this assistant Best at chaining the arithmetic without losing a decimal: three weights, a factor, the gram weight, the case rounding and back to cost per portion, nine lines in a row. Ask it to show the division before the result; when it hides it, the case rounding slips through unnoticed.

How to use it

Have a recent invoice for your most expensive item at hand and know the unit it is billed in: case, kilo or piece.

Load the assistant into your usual AI and answer, one at a time, its questions about dishes, services and channels.

Weigh that item's chain —purchase, trimmed, servable— exactly as the assistant asks and hand back the three numbers.

Receive the real portions per purchase unit and the service forecast split by channel.

Turn the forecast into a rounded purchase list, and keep the template to repeat the weighing next month.

Which of your data it uses

of 23

This assistant works with 8 of the 23 fields in «My Restaurant», among them Cuisine or concept, Number of locations and Best-selling dishes. It does not ask out of curiosity: these are what make the answer speak about YOUR scale instead of an industry average — the same calculation on a business of another size returns a number you cannot decide with. You fill them once and they apply across the library, so the second assistant you open already starts with them in place. Whatever you leave blank, the assistant asks for one thing at a time instead of inventing it, and says so before answering, so you know what it is working from.

Cuisine or conceptNumber of locationsBest-selling dishesStrong and slow daypartsActive sales channelsAverage check (with currency)Average monthly salesApproximate food cost (%)