Food cost software for restaurants: know your real cost.

Food cost software keeps track of what a restaurant pays for its ingredients, so the owner can see costs rise before they eat into the margin. LagatBook does this from the supplier bills you already get: each approved bill becomes a dated price per kg, litre or piece for every ingredient on it, with the bill kept as proof.

A 25 kg bag of basmati rice for ₹2,600 plus 5% GST becomes ₹109.20 per kg. A 15 litre tin of oil becomes a price per litre. Prices in different pack sizes become comparable, so you can see that oil went up 6.5% even when the tin size changed.

Food cost is the biggest bill most restaurants pay, and it moves every week. Oil goes up by a few rupees a litre, paneer by ten rupees a kilo, and nobody notices until the month's numbers look wrong. The proof was on the supplier bills all along, but those bills are on paper, in WhatsApp photos and in PDFs, and nobody has time to compare them.

LagatBook keeps that proof in one place. Each approved bill adds the exact price you paid to your price book, and the next bill from the same supplier shows what changed. To turn those prices into a monthly number, see the food cost percentage formula.

• Add the billTake a photo, upload the PDF your supplier sent, or type it in line by line. Typing always works.
• Check each lineEvery line starts unchecked. Compare it with the bill and tap “Looks right”. Nothing becomes a price until you approve.
• Approve, and knowWhen the total matches, approve. Each price is saved per kg, per litre or per piece, and the next bill from that supplier shows exactly what changed.

• The latest price you paid for each ingredient, per kg, litre or piece
• What changed since the last bill, up or down, with the percentage
• Old prices flagged, so you know which ones to check again
• Every price opens the bill it came from
• Download it all as a CSV file for your accountant
• Separate prices for each location, never averaged together

LagatBook also stops two easy mistakes: it warns you when a bill looks like one you already approved, and when a price is far from what you usually pay.

LagatBook is a separate add-on with its own login and its own data. If you bill with POSBADA restaurant billing, the owner opens it from Settings and signs in with POSBADA. Your sales and menu stay in POSBADA; LagatBook only holds the supplier bills and prices you add.

LagatBook is made by POSBADA, the restaurant POS and billing software from Ankaavi Technologies in Gurugram.

Coming next: recipe costs and dish margins, so you can see what each plate costs you to make and which dishes need a new price. Until then, the food cost percentage formula shows how to price a dish from these ingredient prices, and our restaurant closing checklist includes the monthly stock note.