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. Clicking it opens the AI cost assistant, which reviews your fixed business costs and costed recipes and recommends overhead, markup, and break-even.

The six tiles in the hub

The hub is organized into six clickable tiles. Each one takes you to its own screen, in this order (routes are relative to https://app.areacacao.com):

Some tiles include decorative labels that preview what you'll find inside (for example Under a minute and All editable afterwards on Express costing, Purchase history and Current prices on Ingredient prices, Labor and Equipment on Rate settings, or Fixed costs and Allocation on Fixed business costs). 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 — the prorated monthly total, in your profile currency.
• Total costs defined — number of costs you've logged.

If you haven't logged any cost yet, the banner still shows up with a zero amount (for example €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 (Express costing, Profitability, ingredient prices and an ingredient's detail, rate settings, fixed costs and cost centers) 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. If you arrived through a link that remembers where you came from (for example, the business costs link in a recipe's Costs tab), the button reads Back to recipe and takes you back to the screen you came from.

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 selling price per channel (for example Direct (DTC), Wholesale or Retail), 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. The only exception is the legacy free accounts (those created before sign-up required choosing a plan): they have no profitability traffic light and no PDF export of the cost breakdown. The AI cost assistant uses credits for each run (see its page).

Next steps