Prep items

A prep item is something you make in order to make something else. It is a recipe — it has ingredients and a cost — but other recipes consume it the way they consume an ingredient.

Why they matter

Half the cost of a menu is usually hidden in prep. If sambal is entered as a flat "RM 0.60 per portion" guess, then every dish using sambal is guessed, and chilli going up 40% changes nothing on any report. Make it a prep item and one batch re-costs six dishes.

Creating one

1. Go to Inventory & Recipes → Prep Items and choose New Prep Item. Add its ingredients like a recipe.
2. Set the batch yield — Yield Quantity and Yield UOM: how much one batch produces, in the unit it is counted in (2.5 kg of sambal, 20 L of stock).
3. Save. Servora creates a matching entry in your ingredient list automatically.

From then on, "Sambal" appears in the ingredient picker of every other recipe, priced per gram off its own batch cost.

1. Yield Quantity — how much one batch makes.
2. Yield UOM — the unit it is counted in at a stock take.
3. Shelf Life — how long it keeps. Labels use it to print a use-by date.
4. Storing Instruction — chilled, frozen or ambient. Printed on the SOP.
5. Ingredients Used — what goes in. A prep item can go into another.
6. Batch Total Cost — everything in one batch, at today's prices.
7. Cost per Unit — the batch cost divided by the yield: what a recipe pays per kg.
8. How this works — saving it keeps a matching ingredient up to date, so recipes can use it.

Prep inside prep

A prep item can contain another prep item — a curry base inside a curry, a stock inside a sauce inside a dish. Costs chain all the way down. Changing the price of one onion moves the final dish by a fraction of a sen, correctly.

Prep and stock

Prep items are counted in stock takes like anything else, because a 20 L stockpot in the walk-in is real inventory with real money in it. If a central kitchen makes your prep, see Production orders — the batch is recorded there and transferred to the outlet.

Labels

Prep is also what the label printer is for. Every batch gets a label with what it is, when it was made and when it must be used by — see Print a label.