An operator-built calculator for UK cafés and restaurants. Cost every dish, get a verdict on each one ranked by the money at stake, find the gap between the GP on paper and the GP in the bank, and test a supplier rise or a new price before you decide.
A costing sheet tells you what a dish costs. This one tells you what to do about it.
For: The owner or head chef of one independent café, coffee shop or small restaurant in the UK who wants the number behind every dish and a Monday routine for keeping the margin.
The free taste of the paid GP gap tab. A menu can show 70% gross profit on paper and bank 60%. Move the sliders and watch where the points go.
Menu Costing & GP Calculator
Every dish costed and given a verdict, ranked by the money at stake. The gap between the GP on paper and the GP in the bank. What a supplier rise does to your week, before you decide. Excel and Google Sheets.
What it tells you
Built and tested
How it works
The operator layer
Get the operator’s edition
£39. Two Excel files and the six-page operator’s guide. Works in Google Sheets. Every corrected version free.
Anyone can get a costing template. What a template cannot give you is the judgement that follows the number: which dish to touch first, where the missing margin is actually going, and what this week’s supplier email will do to the menu. That is what this edition adds, from twenty years of running sites.
Ingredients with pack size, price, VAT rate and usable yield. Recipes built from them. Menu & GP with plate cost, net price after VAT, GP in pounds and per cent, food-cost %, a status against your target, and the blended GP% of the whole menu from your weekly sales mix. A Price finder for the price each dish needs.
Menu actions reads each dish’s margin against your target and its sales against the menu average, gives it one of four verdicts (protect, re-price or re-portion, promote or move, cut or replace), the action to take, and the pounds a week at stake, ranked. Each verdict carries an “At the table” note from the author.
Opening stock, purchases, closing stock, staff meals and sales for the period. The tab works out your actual food cost, sets it against the food cost your menu mix says you should have, and shows the gap in points, pounds a week and pounds a year, with the eight places the points usually go, in the order an operator checks them.
One ingredient’s price changes. A rise across one supplier. A new price on one dish, with the customers you expect to lose. Crossing the VAT threshold. Each one shows the weekly effect on the whole menu.
Log supplier quotes; anything over your trigger flags with its weekly cost. Then five live numbers, the five biggest moves this week, and the twenty-minute routine that keeps the margin.
Eat-in and hot takeaway at the standard rate, cold takeaway food at zero, the not-registered case, and the rules written out from HMRC’s VAT Notice 709/1 and GOV.UK, read 15 October 2026, with links.
It costs ingredients, not labour, rent, energy or delivery commission. GP is not profit. It is not tax, accounting or legal advice. The “At the table” notes are one operator’s experience; your trade will differ.
An illustrative copy worked through for the Corner Café, a fictional café, so every tab shows what good looks like; a blank copy for your menu; and the six-page operator’s guide. Formulas locked without a password, no macros, every function also in Google Sheets.
The owner or head chef of one independent café, coffee shop or small restaurant in the UK.
Groups with a purchasing system that already costs recipes. Anyone wanting stock control or ordering; this is costing, pricing and menu decisions only.
Real values from the illustrative copy. The Corner Café is fictional and its prices are not a price list.
Ali Solak has spent more than twenty years in hospitality operations and leadership, running outlets across five countries. In London he led the multi-site rollout of Simit Sarayı, with sites on Oxford Street, Bond Street, Piccadilly Circus, Leicester Square, Villiers Street, Southampton Row, King’s Road and Green Lanes.
In June 2024 he founded Epicurean Digital Consultants, a London consultancy for independent cafés, restaurants and hospitality brands. It is founder-led: you work with Ali directly, not with an account manager. He is the author of Before You Sign the Lease.
The operator’s edition
£39.00
Two Excel files (illustrative and blank) and the six-page operator’s guide.
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