Margins
Every item costed on its own terms, with each platform’s cut taken off the dish it belongs to and every supplier price read from your own invoices and dated.
What it does
The same dish doesn't earn the same on every channel, and the difference is bigger than the gap in menu price. Each one is costed on its own terms.
Every price is read off your own invoices and filed with the date it arrived, so an ingredient carries its whole history — your first invoice to now. Each new delivery is checked against the last one for that item, and any change in price is flagged as the invoice goes in.
The invoices already say what came in. Counting what is left turns that into what actually got used.
One dish, five channels
Dish costs are set from your invoice prices when you cost the menu; they don’t re-run when a price moves. Price changes are flagged so you know when to re-cost.
The figure shown is what remains after VAT, food, packaging and the channel charges in this example. It contributes towards wages, rent and other business costs.
Five prices from £5.50 to £6.95. What’s left after these costs varies by 12p.
The own site column is priced like the counter but pays to take the payment, so on this dish it keeps the least at £3.17.
That isn't a law. It's what happens when the delivery prices are set deliberately and the own-site price isn't. Pricing every channel on purpose is the whole point.
Platform ads and promo funding are real money and they show up in the P&L as a whole-business cost. What they aren't is attributable to a single dish, so they're not in this table.
The channel charges in this example are the platform’s commission on Just Eat, Uber Eats and Deliveroo, an all-in rate for online ordering and card processing on your own site, and card processing in store. Delivery drivers aren’t included; they’re a per-order cost that sits in the P&L.
Four things come off the menu price. The channel charge — commission on the apps, the all-in rate on your own site, card processing in store — charged as a share of the gross sell price with VAT included, the basis platform statements use. VAT, taken out at the standard rate before anything is called profit. Food, costed from supplier invoice prices at the quantities that go into the dish. Packaging — box, bag, lid, sauce pot — costed into the item.
No channel is free. The apps take a commission, your own ordering site carries an all-in rate for online ordering and card processing, and your counter still carries card processing. The app itself carries card fees as a P&L cost line; this table shows them per order, because a percentage of the sell price is per-order arithmetic. Same money, two views of it.
What changes
Set the number that covers that channel's cut.
Work out what the discount leaves you before you agree to it.
See what each dish leaves before deciding what to push — alongside how many you sell and how long it takes to make.
Go at the ones moving your food cost.
Before you ask
That's the point of photographing the invoice. The new line lands in that ingredient's history — the price, the pack size and the date it arrived — so the movement is there to see. Silent supplier increases are one of the most common leaks there is.
No. My hours go into making the software better. If you want hands-on help beyond setup, that's the consultancy: a one-off engagement, priced as one.
I’ll cost it on every channel you sell it on, from your own invoice prices, and see whether it is worth the space on the menu.
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