Читать книгу 101 Restaurant Secrets - Ross Inc. Boardman - Страница 11

We have just added waste, shipping and few other costs onto your food bill, but it can work the other way round. Your business is food and people need to eat. Sometimes either or both of these events mean that the food is not being charged for. A key take home here is to work out where that cost needs to sit in your books and a way of getting it there.

Press night

You invite a few members of the press or some bloggers around for a private event to showcase your latest venue or menu. These people are not expected to pay but the food is still coming out of your pocket. You may put the cost of the food down as public relations or something similar on your expense statement.

Staff meals

This is a staff cost, to be more specific, this goes down somewhere near the bit in your books where you write the payroll costs. If you didn’t have staff, you would not have staff meals. It is certainly not just a cost that goes with the restaurant trade, any business can be paying for canteens or subsidised food.

Prizes

Offering a free meal for a local charity competition is a good thing to do. It is not a discount or even a free voucher, this is a charity expense, the other two are forms of cash.

Lab samples

At first you would think this is a kitchen expense and should maybe even go down as a food cost. Yes, it is a kitchen cost, but just like cleaning materials, this does not go down as food. If you take and hold samples for storage or direct lab testing, then these need writing off your stock and putting down as hygiene, compliance or lab costs.

With all of these you need to make sure you record what has gone out of stock, the cost of the food and where it is going in your accounts. This is going to be a bit harder with prizes, so you could just look at your target costs are on what the guests order and write that down.

Development

When a recipe is being designed there needs to be some practise and even experimentation to get the final dish consistent and as you like it. Such cost should be written down as development.