Costing guides for kitchens that need answers.
Operator guides built around the same pressure points Karu tackles every day: invoices, recipe costing, supplier changes, price history, and margin decisions.
Start with the guides that already passed our first trust review, then use Karu to turn the math into a repeatable workflow.
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Featured guides
Food Cost Percentage: The Number Every Menu Needs
A practical guide to calculating food cost percentage, reading the result, and turning it into better menu decisions.
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Restaurant Menu Pricing Formula: Price From Cost, Not Guesswork
How to move from ingredient cost to a selling price that protects margin without ignoring the market.
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Recipe Costing for Bakeries: Yield, Batches, and Tiny Margins
A bakery-focused costing guide for doughs, fillings, toppings, packaging, waste, and batch yields.
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Supplier Price History: The Margin Leak Most Teams Miss
Why supplier price history matters and how restaurants can use it to catch silent margin erosion.
Read guideCosting
Food Cost Percentage: The Number Every Menu Needs
A practical guide to calculating food cost percentage, reading the result, and turning it into better menu decisions.
Open articleThe Real Problem Is Not Recipe Costing. It Is Keeping Costs Current
Most owners can cost a recipe. The harder job is stopping those numbers from going stale the moment suppliers change.
Open articleHow to Calculate the Real Cost of a Dish
A practical method to turn recipes, yields, packaging, and current supplier prices into an honest dish cost before you set or defend a menu price.
Open articlePricing
Restaurant Menu Pricing Formula: Price From Cost, Not Guesswork
How to move from ingredient cost to a selling price that protects margin without ignoring the market.
Open article
Margin Alerts: When Should a Restaurant Change Prices?
How to decide whether a supplier increase requires a menu price change, recipe adjustment, or supplier switch.
Open articleWhen Supplier Prices Change, Which Menu Items Should You Check First?
Do not review the whole menu blindly. Start where a supplier increase can actually hurt the business fastest.
Open article
How to Price Pastries and Cakes with Packaging Included
A clear way to price sweets and cakes when boxes, labels, ribbons, and delivery packaging quietly erase bakery margins.
Open articleHow to Include Delivery and Card Fees in Menu Pricing
A practical way to fold delivery platform commissions and card fees into menu prices so takeaway and delivery products keep the margin you think they have.
Open articleBakeries
Recipe Costing for Bakeries: Yield, Batches, and Tiny Margins
A bakery-focused costing guide for doughs, fillings, toppings, packaging, waste, and batch yields.
Open article
Confectionery Tech Sheet: What Belongs on a Pastry Recipe Card
What a usable confectionery tech sheet must include so the kitchen can execute and the owner can cost — without mixing staff and margin data.
Open articleSuppliers
Supplier Price History: The Margin Leak Most Teams Miss
Why supplier price history matters and how restaurants can use it to catch silent margin erosion.
Open articleSupplier Comparison for Restaurants: Cheapest Is Not Always Best
How to compare suppliers using unit price, reliability, pack size, tax, quality, and affected recipe margins.
Open articleHow to Catch Invoice Price Increases Before They Eat Your Margins
Most margin leaks start quietly on the invoice, long before they show up in the monthly numbers.
Open articleMargins
Fixed Cost Allocation: Seeing the Whole Restaurant, Not Just Food Cost
How rent, utilities, staff, subscriptions, and other fixed costs can inform menu pricing without creating fake precision.
Open articleSales Uploads: Connecting Menu Cost to What Actually Sells
Why sales data changes recipe costing from a static exercise into a profitability system.
Open articleMenu Engineering for Small Restaurants: Keep, Fix, Feature, or Remove
A simple decision framework for menu profitability using margin and popularity.
Open articleYour POS Is Not the Same Thing as Margin Control
A POS can tell you what sold. It usually cannot tell you whether the menu is still making the money you think it is.
Open articleRecipes
Sub-Recipes: The Clean Way to Cost Sauces, Doughs, Bases, and Prep
Why recipes should be able to contain other recipes, and how that changes costing accuracy.
Open articleAllergen Management in Recipes: Operational Safety, Not Decoration
Why allergen tracking belongs in the recipe workflow for restaurants, bakeries, cafes, and food trucks.
Open articleAI
Invoice Extraction with AI: Turning Messy Supplier Documents into Usable Costs
How multimodal AI can reduce the pain of invoice data entry while keeping humans in control.
Open articleAI Data Cleanup for Restaurants: From Messy Inputs to Reviewable Drafts
How AI can organize recipes, invoices, menus, photos, and text without removing human approval.
Open articleAI Recipe Costing Needs Confidence Badges
Why estimated prices and AI-extracted data should be clearly marked without scaring the user.
Open articleReview Center: Why AI Drafts Need Human Approval Before They Become Official
Karu's Review Center is where extracted invoices, recipe links, duplicate merges, and unclear units wait for a human yes before they touch live margin data.
Open articleStaff
Offline Staff Binder: Recipe Access for Real Kitchens
Why staff recipe access should work on weak Wi-Fi and hide sensitive business data.
Open articleRecipe Print Export: Why Digital Systems Still Need Paper-Ready Output
How printable recipe sheets support prep, training, audits, and kitchen execution.
Open articleOperations
Restaurant Profitability Dashboard: What Owners Actually Need to See
A practical dashboard model for owners who need decisions, not decorative charts.
Open article
Restaurant Costing Spreadsheet vs Software: When the Spreadsheet Breaks
A sober comparison of spreadsheets and purpose-built costing software for small food businesses.
Open article
Opening a Restaurant? Build Cost Control Before the Menu Gets Busy
A pre-opening checklist for recipe costing, suppliers, packaging, staff recipes, and margin review.
Open articleWhy Restaurant Costing Software Fails After Week 2
Most costing tools do not fail on day one. They fail when real invoices, substitutions, and rushed kitchen decisions start piling up.
Open articleWhy Most Owners Stay in Spreadsheets Longer Than They Want To
Owners do not cling to spreadsheets because they love them. They stay because the alternatives often ask for too much trust too early.
Open articleWhat to Upload First: A 3-Document Margin Diagnostic
You do not need a perfect data room to find the first margin leak. Three real documents are usually enough to see what is confirmed, what is weak, and what to review next.
Open articleThe Karu Inbox: One Intake Flow for Invoices, Recipes, Menus, and Sales
How a single document inbox turns PDFs, photos, spreadsheets, and pasted text into structured drafts ready for review.
Open article