Costing & recipes
Every recipe carries a real cost per unit, built from its ingredient lines. Here's where each number comes from and how to keep it honest.
What a recipe holds
A recipe is its name, a category, what it yields (quantity + unit), free-text instructions (numbered into steps automatically), total time, and its ingredient lines. Recipes also carry allergens — pick from the standard EU-14 list — and free-text tags with autocomplete.
How ingredient lines are costed
Each line picks one of four costing modes:
- Inventory item — the strongest option. The line pulls the item's average unit cost and converts units automatically (grams to kilos, cups to milliliters). When a new purchase shifts the item's average cost, the recipe follows.
- Manual amount — a fixed cost you type in.
- Uncosted — counted in the recipe, ignored in the math.
- Sub-recipe — the line is another recipe's output (croissant dough inside an almond croissant), and that recipe's full cost rolls up into this one.
Labor
Recipes take a labor time in minutes. Whether labor counts toward recipe cost is a bakery-wide switch: Include labor in recipe cost, in Settings.
Margin and price
Butterbase computes the cost per unit from the lines above, and you set the sell price. The margin shows as a percentage — green when the price covers cost, red when a bake is losing money. That red badge is the whole reason this app exists.
Categories
Categories are managed in Settings → Categories — create, merge, reorder, and archive them there, and every recipe stays consistent.
Scaling a bake
The scale preview recalculates quantities and costs for a bigger or smaller batch without touching the recipe itself.