Tips

Recipe Tree too narrow for you? Use the mouse to move the cursor just to the right of the scroll bar between the ingredients and the Recipe tree. Two lines with arrows on either side will appear. Click and hold your left mouse button and "move" the line to the left or the right to the desired location.

Recipe Tree

CostGuard has a graphic Recipe Tree on the Ingredient tab showing all components of that Recipe.  Recipe Tree will show if ingredients are Inventory Items, or Recipes.  It has handy linking features, which can add up quantities for ingredients, and allow you to print or edit an item directly from the Tree.  Recipe Tree is great for answering “What-if” questions.  When you open a Recipe, the Recipe Tree is on the Ingredient Tab to the far right of the screen.  An example is shown below.

 

1.       The items with the small blue box are Inventory Items; those with a yellow folder are Recipes.  The Ingredients are listed in the same order as the main Ingredient field.

2.       Click a yellow folder to show the Prep Recipe’s components.  The example below shows what happens when you click the yellow folders in front of Marinara Sauce and Plate Garnish.

 

 

3.       Highlight a recipe used as an ingredient and right click.  This menu will appear. 

 

 

 

This menu below will appear if you right click on an Inventory Item

 

4.       Below, is an explanation of the commands.

Expand All:  Expands all of the linked recipes, showing their ingredients.

Collapse All: Collapses all of the linked recipes.

Find:  If the recipe has many ingredients, or is a menu with multiple recipes, use the find function to search for them.  Click Find and a pop-up menu will appear.  Type in the name of the ingredient, and then choose search up or down.  Click Find Next to find each use of the ingredient.

Edit Linked Recipe or Item:  Use this command to edit the linked Recipe or the Inventory Item used for ingredients.  You can use it to double check the information on any tab, without exiting the first Recipe and opening the Inventory or Recipe Edit windows.

Recost Linked Recipe or Item:  Use to recost for up-to-date pricing on the Recipe or the Inventory Item.  Use this feature to see what will happen to the cost of a dish if the ingredient costs increase or decrease.  This feature answers the question: “What if the price of chicken breasts increases or decreases?  What will happen to the cost of this recipe?”  

Print Linked Recipe:  You can print the linked recipes directly from this screen, keeping them together for production sheets.  For other printing options, click here.

Statistics:  Since the same ingredient can be used for multiple prep recipes, Statistics gives a brief overview of an item.  Move your cursor to the ingredient, right click, and then click Statistics.  This pop-up screen will appear with the details on the ingredient item.  You can use this feature to check ingredients if you need to modify a recipe.  For example, if you wanted to replace the salt with a low sodium alternative, this pop-up will show how many times and what quantity salt is used for this recipe.

Print Recipe Tree: This will print the recipe tree.

Disable Recipe Tree:  Click on this command to shut off the Recipe Tree.  Click it again to show the tree.  If you have large recipe, you may wish to disable recipe tree until you have finished typing in all the ingredients.

Show Quantity: Click this to show the quantities used for each ingredient.

Show Cost: Click this to show the cost of each ingredient.

You can click both quantity and cost to show both, and you may wish to adjust the window size to fit them on the screen.

Refresh: refreshes the screen with update information.