Track COGS Variance
COGS variance shows the gap between what your recipes say your sales should have used (theoretical) and what actually left your stock — so you can spot waste, over-portioning, theft, or a mis-costed recipe.
How the data is produced
Every night, a background job snapshots the previous day: it reads your posted POS sales, matches each sold item to its Active recipe, and works out how much of each ingredient — and what it cost — those sales should have consumed, including waste %. The day boundary uses your time zone from Settings. Only companies with the module licensed and at least one Active recipe are processed.
:::info Sub-recipes aren't expanded yet Only direct inventory items are included in the theoretical calculation today — sub-recipe ingredients aren't recursively expanded in COGS snapshots (recipe costing already rolls sub-recipes up correctly; this is specifically about the nightly snapshot). :::
The COGS Variance report
Go to Restaurant → COGS Variance.
- Set Date From / Date To (defaults to the last 7 days) and an optional warehouse, then Apply.
- Review the KPI cards — total theoretical cost, total actual cost, overall variance %.
- The table lists ingredients with theoretical qty, actual qty, variance qty, variance %, theoretical cost, and variance cost — sorted biggest variance first, color-coded red over 20%, amber 10–20%, green under 10%.
- Export to Excel, or, with Manage recipes, Recalculate to re-run the snapshot for a range up to about 3 months — useful for back-filling or refreshing after a correction.
A positive variance means you used more than the recipe predicts (waste or loss); a negative variance means less. Start investigating with the largest positive variances on your costliest ingredients.
COGS Dashboard
Click Dashboard from the variance page for KPI cards (including snapshot coverage — how many days in range actually have data), a theoretical-vs-actual line chart, and a Top 5 Variance Items table.