Costs tab

What it is

The Costs panel works out the true cost of a recipe end to end — ingredients, supplies, labor, equipment, and overhead — and turns it into selling prices per channel. It lives in the recipe's right-hand side panel, alongside Nutrition and Validation.

Everything recalculates live as you edit: change a few labor hours, add a piece of equipment, or drag the target margin, and the KPIs, breakdown, and prices update instantly. Changes autosave; there's no Save button.

How to get there

• Path: https://app.areacacao.com/validation?id=<id> → side panel → Costs.
• How to reach it: open any recipe from /recipes and, in the side panel, pick Costs.

KPIs

At the top you see four cards:

• Total cost — the fully loaded batch cost (ingredients + supplies + labor + equipment + overhead). If any cost is missing, the card becomes Partial batch cost.
• Cost / unit — cost per sellable unit, with a note of how many sellable units come out (or Incomplete cost and how many ingredients have a cost).
• Cost / 100g — cost per 100 grams of product.
• Costed items — how many ingredients have a cost assigned versus the total (e.g. 8 / 10).

Below them, View details opens Where this cost comes from: each ingredient's price with its source, the quantities, and the formulas that lead to the total, the cost per unit, and the cost per 100 g.

Panel notices

Depending on the recipe's state, the panel shows you:

• Incomplete cost — if ingredients are still pending or have no cost, a notice tells you how many and sends you to the Ingredients tab. While the cost is incomplete, selling prices aren't calculated (you can still save your selling price).
• Price book — if your price book has a different price for an ingredient, you'll see the recipe price next to the book price, and the Update this recipe's prices button.
• Reference prices — if an ingredient is costed with its category's reference price, the panel says so and offers Set my prices.
• Selling price — the first time the recipe has a complete cost and no price yet, the Set your selling price to classify card suggests one at the channel's margin; when you click Save price, it's saved to the first channel and the profitability traffic light can classify the recipe.

Health indicator (food cost)

With a complete cost, a strip compares the ingredient cost per unit with the first channel's price and flags it against the healthy 25-35% band:

• In band (green): Food cost X% — within the healthy range (25-35%).
• Out of band (amber): Food cost X% — outside the healthy 25-35% range.

Total cost breakdown

A card splits the total cost into its lines with their percentage: Ingredients, Labor, Equipment, and Overhead. If the recipe uses supplies (packaging, candy cups, labels) with a cost, a Supplies line also appears, 100% variable. See Supplies in the cost.

Collapsible sections

Each block opens and closes independently. Ingredient cost and Selling prices are open by default.

Ingredient cost

A horizontal bar chart with the top 10 ingredients by absolute cost. If no costs are set yet, it links you to Costs / Ingredients to assign them.

Labor (multi-role)

Add as many rows as there are roles involved with Add role. Each row has:

• Role — picked from your rates (it shows the hourly rate next to the name).
• Hours — hours of that role in the recipe.
• Type — Active or Passive (equipment only).

Equipment (multi-item)

With Add equipment you add machines. Depending on how the item is defined in your rates, the row asks for Hours (machine-hour cost with depreciation) or Uses (per-use cost).

Yield

A read-only summary of the recipe's yield: Ingredient weight, Waste (%), Final weight, and Sellable units (for example 48 × 25 g, or Whole batch (1)). The cost per unit spreads the full batch cost over what remains after waste; if the recipe has no units yet, the cost per unit is the cost of the whole batch.

Waste and units aren't edited here: the Edit in Yield button takes you to the editor's Yield tab.

Overhead cost

Allocates fixed business costs to the recipe. You pick the Allocation method from five options:

• % of direct cost — a percentage of ingredients + labor.
• Fixed amount — a fixed amount per sellable unit.
• Hourly rate — a rate per hour applied to active labor hours.
• % of business sales — a share of monthly costs split across units/month.
• Cost centers — select specific cost centers and sum their amounts.

With Fixed amount and % of business sales, the block shows the calculation applied to the batch (amount per unit × sellable units). It also shows your Monthly business costs and links to Costs / Business to edit them.

Selling prices (multi-channel)

A global Target margin (%) slider (60% by default) drives every channel. The recipe starts with one channel, Direct (DTC); Add channel adds Wholesale and Retail (and more), and Remove deletes a channel as long as another one is left. Each card shows:

• The channel's price, calculated from the cost per unit and the margin (or your manual price).
• A channel-specific Target margin (overrides the global one), an optional Manual price, and an optional VAT (%), which adds With VAT: ….
• Equiv. markup, Contribution margin/unit, and Break-even in units/month.

Amounts are shown in your profile's currency.

Available actions

• View cost sheet (PDF) — opens the printable cost sheet for the recipe. See Cost breakdown (PDF).
• Analyze this recipe with AI — takes you to the editor's Costs tab, to the recipe's AI cost analysis (summary, cost drivers, and recommendations). For an analysis of the whole business, see AI cost assistant.

Hybrid navigation

The Costs / Rates link (in Labor) and Manage equipment link (in Equipment) open the Rates & equipment drawer without leaving the recipe: you edit rates or equipment in place and, when you close it, the panel recomputes with the new values. That way you never lose the context of the cost you're tuning.

Plan availability

Available on all plans. The only exception is the older free accounts (created before sign-up required choosing a plan): they don't include PDF export, so View cost sheet (PDF) shows the notice "PDF export is included in the Starter and Pro plans." instead of opening the report.

If you're editing a recipe someone shared with you with edit permission, you don't see the Costs panel: costs stay with the recipe's owner.

Next steps