About ChefKeeper

One of the biggest challenges I faced when taking on the management of the Falcon Manor Hotel kitchen was keeping track of supplier invoices, food costs and margins. I wanted to be able to buy the best quality produce in the right quantities to minimise waste and be able to offer this to diners at a reasonable cost. This is a difficult balancing act and I wanted some kind of software application to help me. I discussed this with a software engineer and out of this grew the ChefKeeper database. This does pretty well everything I need.

Here's what it does:

• Keeps a record of my invoices by product (i.e ingredient), with amounts and cost
• Summarises my yearly and monthly costs by supplier or ingredient
• Provides a method of stocktaking that maintains a monthly record of stock with amounts and value - and uses this to calculate total costs, stocks used and ingredient cost movements
• Provides an output of kitchen costs to a spreadsheet to enable these to be included in the Falcon Manor Hotel's own accounting system
• Allows me to input all my recipes, with ingredient quantities, the method employed and a picture of the finished dish and the ingredient cost
• Allows me to create menus from my recipes, which can be tailored for special occasions, and automatically costed from the latest invoice with an actual cost and a mark-up cost. For a wedding party, say, I can create a customised menu and input the number of guests and get an immediate mark-up cost to discuss with the client. There is also a facility to print a quotation.

For more detail of the ChefKeeper professional kitchen management application, follow this link