Hi everyone I have a question regarding the best way to track and report on a monthly business report my ingredients. I just started using quick books 2011 and noticed that my cost of ingredients are sky high . I know i use a good deal of the actual ingredients i purchase during the month but i do sometime time have stuff left over to use later like flour, eggs, sugar (you know the stuff you just cant buy 1 or a cup of) . I am now stuck trying to figure out the best way to incorporate this into quick books. I have tried to contact the tech support depart but all they seem to be interested in is getting me to sign up for their merchant services and don't quite understand that i am a cake maker not a wholesale cake distributor, (if that makes sense.) please help!

Auhhh!!! Hello is this thing on, I need help people!!!

Sorry, I don't use Quickbooks, I am more manual. I would say just make a spreadsheet but for me I don't track this kind of thing. I would guess that each month has about the same amount of leftover any any other.

Take a look into the Cakeboss software. It might have what you are wanting.

You can do your own cakeboss type thing by breaking down your ingredients and applying the appropriate cost. For example, a cup of flour is .40 (arbitrary#). Have a list of ingredients, such as 1 egg, c milk, tsp vanilla.

Now you can attribute an actual ingredient cost for each recipe. That's what I do. For every product I make, I know exactly how much my ingredients cost. Periodically you need to adjust when an ingredient stays up in cost.

It takes mere seconds to add this up. Just keep a master list of each product so you don't do the math each time. Question: If you didn't know this ahead of time, how did you determine your prices? Not trying to be irritating, but many people read these threads and may not think of this.

On every product, I attribute ingredients, oven time, packaging, and then a number that represents all fixed overhead.

I ran all of mine on a spreadsheet. I determined the standard measurement and logged it that way. For example, I used flour by the cup, so I didn't have a 5-lb bag of flour in stock at a cost of $2.00; I had 20 cups of flour at a cost of 10 cents each. I didn't have a bottle of vanilla at a cost of $3.50. I had 17 teaspoons at a cost of 20 cents each. (Using made-up numbers for simplicity ).

It was easy to determine cost of the cake or cost of inventory AND when I saw what was on hand, easy to determine my restock level.

Hi

I haven't used QB in a long time but here are my thoughts:

1. Remember that the amount of money spent on purchasing ingredients and the cost of ingredients actually used in a recipe are two completely different transactions. Purchasing ingredients affects your cash flow statement and using ingredients affects your P&L statement.

2. Set up your ingredients as inventory in QB making sure to use appropriate units-of-measure (e.g. flour-cups, eggs-each, flavouring-tsps, butter-ounces). Whatever you think is appropriate.

3. When you have made a purchase, determine the quantity of UOM in each purchased ingredient (e.g. one bottle of vanilla essence = 20 tsps) and enter the transaction into QB.

4. The final step would be to create a Bill Of Materials (BOM) in QB which, in your case, would be a recipe using the already predefined UOM. So, you would create a BOM for a chocolate cake with all of the ingredients and quantities required.

5. When you then make a sale, you should be able to select the chocolate cake from a dropdown box on the invoice page and QB will automatically deduct the quantities for that cake from your inventory.

HTH!

Stacey

Yeah debi, like that. Your explanation was much clearer. On the side of every one of my recipes, there is a cost written in the top left corner, based on those breakdowns. If you are good at adding in your head, it only takes about 5 seconds to cost out a recipe. And for those who do large cakes, you multiplied the recipe. Just multiply the cost. Jot it down by the size so you only have to do it once.