Menu Costing Template: How to Cost Your Menu (and Why Spreadsheets Break)
Every kitchen needs a menu costing template. Here is exactly what a good one contains, a worked AUD example you can copy, the five ways spreadsheet costings quietly fail — and how to know when you have outgrown one.
Quick answer
A working menu costing template needs six things: ingredient costs at per-unit rates, a yield percentage per ingredient, exact portion sizes, sub-recipes costed separately, a target food cost % with a calculated suggested sell price, and a date on every price. The template is the easy part — keeping the prices in it true is what breaks spreadsheets.
The anatomy
What a menu costing template actually needs
Ingredient costs at per-unit rates
Never the pack price. Divide every supplier price by the pack size to get a per-gram, per-ml, or per-each rate. A $42.50 carton of 24 brioche buns is $1.77 per bun — that is the number your template multiplies, not $42.50.
Yield / waste percentage per ingredient
Raw weight is not plated weight. Whole chicken breast yields 82–88% after trim, onions 88–92% peeled, whole fish 40–55% to fillet. Divide the per-unit rate by the yield percentage so every recipe is costed on what actually reaches the plate.
Portion sizes from standardised recipes
Quantities in grams and millilitres, taken from the recipe the kitchen actually cooks — not 'a handful' and not the opening chef's memory. If the template says 180g and the pass plates 210g, the template is fiction.
Sub-recipes costed separately
Sauces, stocks, doughs, and compound butters get their own costing, reduced to a cost per 100ml or 100g. Parent dishes then reference the sub-recipe as one line. When the tinned tomato price moves, the napolitana cost moves, and every pizza and parma should move with it.
Target food cost % and suggested sell price
The template should work backwards as well as forwards: sell price (ex GST) = dish cost ÷ target food cost %, then × 1.1 for the GST-inclusive menu price. A column comparing suggested price to current menu price shows you instantly which dishes are underpriced.
Price dates and allergen tags
Every price needs a 'last checked' date — an undated price is a guess. And since you are listing every ingredient anyway, tag the FSANZ-declared allergens per line so your allergen matrix builds itself from the same source of truth.
Worked example
Costing a wagyu beef burger — 1 serve
Here is the template in action on a burger, at realistic AUD wholesale rates. Note the yield adjustments and the sub-recipe line — this is what most downloadable templates leave out.
| Ingredient | Cost | ||
|---|---|---|---|
| Wagyu beef patty | $3.51 | ||
| Brioche bun | $1.77 | ||
| Cheddar slice | $0.30 | ||
| Bacon (cooked yield 70%) | $0.56 | ||
| Lettuce, tomato, onion (trimmed) | $0.45 | ||
| Burger sauce (sub-recipe) | $0.27 | ||
| Chips + seasoning (side) | $0.63 | ||
| Total food cost per serve | $7.49 | ||
Prices are illustrative AUD wholesale rates. The bacon rate is $13.00/kg as-purchased, divided by a 70% cooked yield.
Now the template works backwards from a target. At a 28% food cost target:
Minimum sell price (ex GST)
$7.49 ÷ 0.28 = $26.75
Menu price (GST-inclusive, × 1.1)
$26.75 × 1.1 = $29.43
So the burger and chips need to sit at $29.50–$30 on the menu to hit a 28% food cost. Priced at $26, it is actually running at 31.7% — and a spreadsheet that compares cost to the GST-inclusive price would tell you it was a comfortable 28.8%. Both GST and yield handling have to be right, on every dish, every time the template is touched.
The honest part
Why menu costing spreadsheets break
A spreadsheet template is genuinely the right starting point — it forces the discipline of costing every dish. But spreadsheets fail in predictable ways, and almost always silently.
Stale prices
The fatal one. Supplier prices move weekly; spreadsheet prices move when someone has a quiet afternoon. Within a quarter, a menu costed at 28% can be trading at 32% with nothing on the sheet changing. The spreadsheet still produces confident-looking percentages — they are just wrong.
Broken formulas
Someone inserts a row inside a SUM range and the total silently stops including the protein. Someone copies a dish tab and the cell references still point at the old sheet. Spreadsheets fail without error messages — the numbers keep rendering, so nobody notices until the P&L disagrees.
No price history
A spreadsheet holds one price per ingredient: the current guess. When chicken jumps from $13 to $16/kg you cannot see when it happened, how often the supplier has moved it, or which dishes absorbed the hit — which is exactly the information you need for a price negotiation or a menu review.
One-person dependency
Every kitchen has the spreadsheet only one person understands. When that chef is on leave, resigns, or simply gets slammed for a month, the costing stops being maintained — and everyone else keeps quoting and pricing from numbers nobody is checking.
Sub-recipes that do not cascade
In most homemade templates the sauce cost is typed into each dish as a number, not linked as a reference. Update the sauce tab and the parmigiana, the pizza, and the meatballs keep their old sauce cost forever. The dishes that share components — usually your bestsellers — are the ones costed worst.
The upgrade path: from template to live costing
The spreadsheet does not fail on day one. It fails at scale: somewhere past 20–30 dishes, a second person needing the data, or a quarter of fast-moving supplier prices, the maintenance burden quietly exceeds the benefit. The signal is simple — if your last full recost was more than a month ago, your costings are already out of date.
Live costing software keeps the same methodology — per-unit rates, yields, sub-recipes, target margins — but removes the maintenance. In Chef Pauly, you photograph or upload a supplier invoice and the AI reads the line items and updates your ingredient prices. Every dish using those ingredients recosts instantly, sub-recipe costs cascade into parent dishes automatically, every price carries its history, and the whole team works from the same live numbers instead of one chef's spreadsheet.
Start with the template — it costs nothing and teaches the discipline. When keeping it current becomes the bottleneck, start a free 14-day trial and import your menu. For a side-by-side look at where Excel struggles, see our Excel recipe costing comparison.
A costing template that updates itself.
Scan a supplier invoice and every affected dish recosts — yields, sub-recipes, and GST included.
FAQ
Menu costing template questions, answered
What should a menu costing template include?
At minimum: every ingredient with the exact quantity per serve, supplier prices converted to per-gram or per-ml rates, a yield or wastage percentage per ingredient, sub-recipes costed separately and referenced as line items, portion sizes from your standardised recipes, a target food cost percentage, and the calculated suggested sell price (worked ex GST, then × 1.1 for the menu). Date-stamp every price — an undated price is a guess.
How do I cost a menu item in a spreadsheet?
List every ingredient with the quantity used per serve. Convert each supplier price to a per-unit rate by dividing by the pack size, then divide by the yield percentage to account for trim and cooking loss. Multiply each quantity by its adjusted rate and sum the column for the food cost per serve. Divide by your GST-exclusive sell price (menu price ÷ 1.1) and multiply by 100 for the food cost percentage.
Why do menu costing spreadsheets become inaccurate?
The main cause is stale prices — supplier prices move weekly, spreadsheet prices move when someone finds time. On top of that: formulas silently break when rows are inserted or tabs are copied, there is no history showing when a price was last verified, sub-recipe costs are typed in rather than linked so they never cascade to parent dishes, and usually only one person understands how the file works.
When should I move from a spreadsheet to menu costing software?
When keeping the spreadsheet current becomes the bottleneck — typically past 20–30 dishes, when multiple people need the data, or when supplier prices move faster than your update routine. A practical test: if your last full menu recost was more than a month ago, you are pricing from stale numbers. Software that updates ingredient prices from scanned supplier invoices, like Chef Pauly, removes the maintenance burden entirely.
Related resources
Related article
How to Calculate Food Cost Per Dish
Step-by-step recipe costing with yields, sub-recipes, and worked examples.
Comparison
Excel vs Chef Pauly for Recipe Costing
Where spreadsheets work, where they break, and what live costing changes.
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