How to get the most out of Craftable

Looking to get the most out of Craftable?  Not sure what to do next? Start here.

Craftable is a powerful tool that can be used to increase your profits and decrease your costs by better understanding your costs, inventory, and operations.  By using the Craftable platform you can calculate your Cost %, and compare it from period to period.

With a POS integration you can build recipes and link these to your POS buttons, so that Craftable can calculate depletions and give you a running theoretical inventory. Additionally, using this information you can calculate a Cost % per recipe, as well as analyze the profitability vs popularity of your menu items. You can also locate items with high variance to start honing in to see if you're over-serving, miscounting, or in other ways hurting your bottom line.

But to achieve all of this you need to use Craftable. The system is only as good as the information you're feeding into it. Below you'll find specifics (as well as links to other articles that dive deeper) on how to achieve all of this on Craftable.

- Calculate Your Cost Percentage

- Get a Theoretical Inventory

- Understand Your Recipe Costs

- Track Variance

Calculate Your Cost Percentage

To calculate a Cost % you need to know 4 things -

1. Starting Inventory
2. Purchases
3. Ending Inventory
4. Total Sales

From there, it's a basic math equation:

In order to do this on Craftable you need to have taken 2 audits, processed all of your invoices from between those two audit dates, and pulled in your POS Sales numbers when closing the last audit. (If you have a POS integration and this isn't auto-pulling, be sure to do your POS Ops Group Mapping. If you don't have a POS integration you can run the sales figures from your POS and manually enter them.)

Once you've done this you can run your Cost Summary by Ops Group report (available under Reports > Report List > Inventory tab) and see your Cost % for each Ops Group.

Get a Theoretical Inventory

Users with a Premium or Pro subscription (and a compatible POS system) are able to get a theoretical inventory by building recipes on Craftable and linking these recipes to your POS buttons and modifiers.

To do this you need to:

1. Take a starting inventory
2. Have your POS integrated into Craftable (check the Point of Sale section in the nav bar!)
3. Build your Recipes in Craftable
4. Match your Recipes to the POS Items and POS Modifiers

This article in the Knowledge Base, titled Theoretical Inventory from your POS, walks you through all the necessary steps to complete this. 

Tip: Don't have time to build out every one of your recipes? That's OK! You can build recipes with just one or two of the ingredients that you want to track on the system (e.g. your proteins, or just the liquors in cocktails). This means that the recipe cost data won't be entirely accurate, but you'll be able to get a theoretical inventory on the items that are mapped, without getting too in the weeds!

Understand Your Recipe Costs

Once you've built recipes and linked them to the relevant POS button or modifier, this opens up some really exciting reports on Craftable that allow you to analyze your theoretical costs and optimize your menu. 

Before you can do this though you do need to:

1. Have your POS integrated into Craftable (check the Point of Sale section in the nav bar!)
2. Build your Recipes in Craftable
3. Match your Recipes to the POS Items and POS Modifiers

Theoretical Costs Report

The Theoretical Costs report shows you your POS Sales data for the selected period, while taking into account the cost to you of the recipe that is matched to the POS button, in order to give you a true Cost % per recipe based on your actual sales data. This means that even if you typically charge $15 for an item but discount this to $10 during Happy Hour, this report will show you the true value of sales you made, taking all of this into account.

Tip: Run this report and click the Cost % column to sort by this column. Click it so all your items with the highest Cost % rise to the top of the list. From here, target all lines where the Cost % is higher than your goal Cost %, and begin to assess if you can do things to decrease the cost to you to produce that recipe, or potentially raise the price on the menu to decrease your Cost %.

The Theoretical Costs report allows you to run the report selecting either Net or Gross sales. If your POS also supports the Theoretical Costs vs Sales report, you can see the Net and Gross sales numbers side by side, as well as the Cost % of Net and Gross. 

You can also choose how to view your Modifiers on this report. If you select "Separate Line" this will lump all the modifier sales together into its own line, which is helpful to see how popular your various modifiers are. Alternatively you can select "Inline", which runs the report with the modifiers actually modifying the POS items, like your POS tickets. This is especially useful for drilling down into specific menu items and seeing how the various modifiers change your Cost %, as well as what your sales quantities are by various modifier configurations. 

For instance, in the screenshot above, we're drilling down into our Kids Cheeseburger menu item and can see that the Fruit Cup side option increases the costs, driving up our Cost %. Luckily for us, the Fries option is clearly more popular. Additionally we can see that most likely our "No Cheese" modifier hasn't been configured yet, as the line with the No Cheese modifier should be running at a slightly lower cost than the line with cheese.

All of this is actionable information that we can use. It's telling us that we should map the "No Cheese" modifier and have the Fries be the recommended side dish to the kids cheeseburger, as it has the lowest Cost % of our most popular kids side dishes.

Menu Engineering Report

Available by going to the Reports List and selecting the Recipes tab, the Menu Engineering report shows a classic Profitability vs Popularity table. This report is also available in Analytics under the Profit Analysis section. Within Analytics you can also manually set your own Cost and Price values and see how this changes the data. 

Select the checkbox at the left to see the row plotted on the graph. Items in the Puzzle section are ones that are profitable but not very popular - maybe have your servers push these items for a few weeks and see if your cost percentage improves. Items in your Dog quadrant are ones that are neither profitable or popular, so would be strong contenders for ones to potentially remove from your menu. 

A few things to note: The Menu Engineering report is using your POS sales data to calculate the Quantity Sold, so you do have to have sold the item during the selected date range in order to see it plotted on the graph. Additionally, the Price value is simply the price you entered as the Serving Price when you built the recipe, and the Sales Total is also this static Serving Price multiplied by the Quantity Sold.

Track Variance

Variance is the difference between what you actually have in stock and what you should have in stock. Understanding items that have variance can show you if you are over-pouring drinks or over-portioning dishes, missing invoices, miscounting during audits, or possibly have a theft issue. 

To do this you need to have done the following things on Craftable:

1. Take a starting Inventory
2. Process all invoices from within the period
3. Built recipes for all menu items
4. Matched recipes to all POS Items and Modifiers (be sure to rerun depletions!)
5. Take an ending Inventory

The best way to analyze your variance is to run Craftable's Actual vs Theoretical report, and then start drilling down on the items with high variance. Check out this article on the AvT report for details on what data you need to have in Craftable and how to read and interpret the report.

If you have specific items with high variance that you want to focus on we recommend inventorying those specific items more frequently using the Partial Audit function so you can really start to hone in on where the variance is coming from. 

Director Tip: If you have Director, you can turn on a setting available under the Director Configuration called "Flag Audit Items for Recount". This will auto-trigger a report to be sent to the user who closes the audit based on the parameters you set at Director. This report will show them items that have been flagged as ones that should be recounted. The goal of this is to ensure that the ending counts are as accurate as possible by getting users to recount items whose variance is over the thresholds you set, in case the variance is just the result of a miscount. See the article Flagging Audit Items for Recount for further details.