Cost Management

Path and purpose

• Path: https://app.areacacao.com/costs
• How to get there: Sidebar → FORMULATION → Costs.
• What it's for: keeping every cost that feeds your real production-cost calculation up to date in one place: ingredient purchase prices, labor and equipment rates, and fixed business costs.

The hub is called Cost management and its description is: "Manage all of your business costs in one place."

This hub holds the global cost configuration. The values you set here are the basis AreaCacao then uses, on each recipe, to compute a fully-loaded cost (ingredients + multi-role labor + equipment with depreciation + overhead) and to suggest a price per sales channel. To see those calculations applied to a specific recipe, use the tools in the Recipe-level costs section.

What you see

Analyze with AI

At the top there's a clickable Analyze with AI card with a cost of ~8 credits. Tapping it opens the AI Cost Assistant, which reviews your cost centers and recommends overhead, markup, and break-even.

Three cost areas

The hub is organized into three clickable tiles. Each one takes you to its own screen:

Each tile includes decorative labels that preview what you'll find inside (for example Purchase history and Current prices on the first, Labor and Equipment on the second, Fixed costs and Allocation on the third). They aren't buttons: the button is the whole tile.

Current summary

As soon as the stats load (after the first query), a Current summary banner appears below the tiles with two figures:

• Monthly business costs — total monthly amount allocated, in euros.
• Total costs defined — number of costs you've logged.

If you haven't logged any cost yet, the banner still shows up with €0.00 and 0.

Need help?

A block at the bottom reminds you that this module centralizes all of your operating costs, with three key ideas to get started:

• Ingredient costs — log each ingredient's price from your purchase invoices for accurate calculations.
• Rate settings — set how much labor costs per hour and the cost of equipment usage; these values are key to calculating the real production cost.
• Automatic calculation — once set up, the app uses this data to calculate the total cost of each recipe automatically.

Back to the hub

Every cost subscreen (ingredient prices, rate settings, fixed costs, and an ingredient's detail) shares a common header with a Costs breadcrumb and a Back button (with the helper text Back to cost hub) that returns you to this hub from any of them.

Recipe-level costs

This hub's configuration is global, but the cost takes shape inside each recipe. Once your prices, rates, and fixed costs are current, AreaCacao automatically computes:

• the recipe's fully-loaded cost: ingredients + labor (per role) + equipment (with its depreciation) + allocated overhead;
• a sales price per channel (workshop, wholesale, online store…), applying the margin you define.

These tools work at the recipe level and are documented separately:

Availability by plan

The Costs section is available on all plans; none of its screens are restricted by plan. The AI Cost Assistant uses credits for each run (see its page).

Next steps