A dish's margin turns on what nobody counts.

You know your sales, never your margin.

A dining room can be full every night and earn nothing. As long as losses are counted nowhere and recipe cards carry prices from six months ago, a dish's margin stays an estimate — and the menu is priced on that estimate.

• The inventory count happens on Sunday, in a notebook, when it happens
• Breakage and unsold food are counted nowhere
• A recipe's cost dates from before the last price rise
• You know what sells, not what it earns

Counted as it happens, not from memory.

Deliveries enter inventory on arrival, outgoings follow sales, and waste is entered in two taps as it happens. It's the unrecorded loss that throws off everything else: a tray binned without being counted makes the count wrong for three weeks.

Alongside it, the recipe card and its real cost, recomputed when purchase prices move. A dish's margin stops being the one from six months ago.

• Deliveries entered on arrival, attached to their order
• Breakage and unsold food counted where they happen
• Recipe cost tracking real purchase prices
• Margin per dish, and margin across the menu

A kitchen that weighs everything gives up after three weeks.

That's why most restaurant inventory systems die: they ask for more than a service allows. We track the categories that weigh on the margin and the losses you can see, and leave the rest on a flat estimate.

The count then covers the gaps, weekly, in a quarter of an hour — not everything, once a year, for the accounts alone.

• The categories that weigh on the margin, not every item
• A fifteen-minute count, weekly, on the gaps
• Sales taken from your POS when it can provide them
• Not a food-safety tool: no HACCP plan, no temperature logs