Hi I am in the process of writing a business plan to start a cake business. I don't want to put out a bunch of cost up front until I know it is a go. My problem is I am trying to write a business model and need to cost my recipes, I have my baking certificate, but have kind of forgotten some things sice getting it 15 years ago. I am wondering if there is a free download out there for costing recipes. I hear the Cake Boss program is great, but it is $100.
Help please

You can easily do it yourself. I think it takes me all of 5 seconds to price a recipe in my head. But you can use a calculator.

Get together the actual price of all ingredients. Start dividing bags of sugar and flour into cups per bag. Same with milk. Then do butter by the pound or quarter pound, eggs divided by 12. Make yourself a master list, right down to tsp in a bottle of vanilla.

Now out to the side of every recipe, list the cost and add it up. On every recipe, I have the cost in the upper right corner on a post-it note... you can change these with price increases.

This will work until you can afford a program, but you may be so good at it you won't need a program.

There is one here in CC, search for it. I dont remember what the thread is.

Good luck.

Patty*

I think this is the link to download the pricing matrix that's an excel spreadsheet. If it's the one I found, it is quite detailed and helpful. Good luck
http://cakecentral.com/modules.....ad&id=2480

I have been doing it manually with a calculator, and I know it works fine, it is just time comsuming. I will check out the cake central one. The excel one does it not require you to set up formulas to calculate everything?

I just did a Google search for "recipe pricing calculator" and several free download options came up. You can check them out and see if any of them work for you.

You can download one here in Excel.

tanya3b, usually the formulas are already set up by the person who offers the download.

This one is even pretty, but it's simple. With some excel knowledge, you can change it and improve it if you want to.

http://thecarolinaclipper.com/2011/03/free-download-recipe-cost-calculator/

Scroll down for download.

The only thing I have to say is that this one is not very user friendly, you can modify it. What I mean is you can add your own ingredients to the list. Plus I live is Canada, so yes we use some imperial, but we are metric, so litres, and grams.

thanks for trying, anything I have seen you have to pay for.

you can send the excel to me. i am trying to price out my plates to be sure i am selling them for the right amount. thank you very much

AI realize this is an old post but wondering if anyone has the spreadsheet to share. All the above links are dead.

Thanks!

You should consider your needs...yes, you can cost manually, it is really about the time and having to do redundant tasks every time you cost.  Considering the food price inflation currently in the market, costing needs to be rather regular.  There are a scattering of free spreadsheets, but they tend to lack conversion abilities (converting volume to weight, etc.) and a useful history so you can track costs.  

That being said, there are programs under 40 bucks which have a lot of great features if you just need to cost, record your recipes, and not have the program run your entire business.  I would recommend CostGizmo -- it's 40 bucks, but they are really nice and will usually send you a coupon for 10 off if you just email them.  It's a simple yet comprehensive app that gives you all the reports and output you need.  It's all a very colorful and lively program, not clinical like a lot of programs.  It runs on the Excel engine, though you don't see excel running when it is on.

If you want to go with a free spreadsheet for costing, I suggest googling "menu (or recipe) costing spreadsheet free".  That will give you a top level search of several free spreadsheets that you can run in Excel like any normal workbook.

I've been an excel user for a long time.  While this is great, it is pretty time consuming and doesn't offer many features. Quickbooks doesn't really work either because that seems to be more for just keeping business records.

I started delving into paid / free software and found one called CostBrain. They let me keep track of my invoices for free but cost a small fee for the food costing aspect.  I probably wouldn't recommend this for personal use but if you are a smaller to larger restaurant this could help.

I found them in the Apple App store....