Hi, I work for a small business currently undergoing a buyout, and the way that the business works is going to be altered radically. It's a pub in my hometown, and we're moving to entirely homecooked food. The problem is, that there's going to be so many ingredients used that vary in price depending on supply, demand, season, etc that keeping track of how much each meal costs is a bit of a dilemma. Basically, at the moment is an Excel spreadsheet with how much each item costs to us per unit weight. What we want to be able to do is make another spreadsheet for recipes whereby all you have to do is list an ingredient and how much you have used and it will call up the price from the database, do a little calculation to hit the profit margin and give you a price of the meal. What we'd also like is that the recipe prices update dynamically when the price changes (or when the rate of VAT changes!). Unfortunately, there is a very wide range of computer literacy and it needs to be set up so that anyone can enter a recipe by typing an ingredient or selecting one from a drop down menu, type how many, for example, grams of peas, breasts of chicken, ounces of steak, etc, they have used and add another ingredient and so on until the recipe is complete, and then get a price of how much the meal should cost to the consumer. I understand this would be possible by typing the ingredient and then telling excel that the price of the ingredient can be found at such and such a place on another document, but that is a bit too much for some unfortunately, especially given the 400+ different items in the database. Was just wondering if Excel was the easiest way, or if there was a simpler method of doing things? I have heard of SQL, but I'm not really that great at coding. It doesn't sound like it should be too hard a task so I'd be willing to learn it if needs be. Thanks in advance, I hope I have explained the problem well enough!
There are a number of programs out there that will work reasonably well for this kind of thing, and certainly better than excel. FileMaker Pro comes to mind (I believe it's Mac-only) but there are a number of other apps out there that are, in effect, non-programmer GUIs around databases. You could always bring in some kind of specialist, but I'd be very surprised if there aren't tools that cater specifically to food-service businesses that do exactly what you've described.
