Skip to main content

Create and Cost your Menus

Written by Sophie Rattray

  1. Before Setting Up Your Stock

  2. Delivery Details and Supplier Set Up

  3. How Units Work in Loaded

  4. Stock Items and Variants

  5. Build Your Recipes

  6. Link Items and Recipes to your POS

  7. Create and Cost your Menus

    1. Creating a Menu

    2. Managing Your Menu

    3. What’s Next?

Menus in Loaded bring your recipes and pricing together, giving you a clear view of cost of goods (COGS) and margins across your dishes.

They’re a powerful tool for reviewing pricing, updating specials, and making confident decisions about your menu profitability — all in one place.

🔐 What You’ll Need

🔑 Stock Permissions

If you don’t have access to the Stock module, ask someone with Manager permissions to update your access.

Video with an Expert

Creating a Menu

Menus are used to group your plated recipes and analyse their pricing and profitability.

Our menus page is getting a face-lift at the moment so hang with us as we move between ‘Menus’ and ‘Menus NEW’. Use ‘Menus’ to print recipes and menus, as well as see POS Item Links. Use ‘Menus NEW’ to see accurate Cost of Goods, Recipe Costs and play with Sell Prices.

  1. Go to Stock → Manage → Menus ‘NEW’

  2. Click Add Menu

  3. Enter a Menu Name (e.g. Dinner Summer Menu)

  4. Add a Menu Group (e.g. Starters, Mains, Desserts)

  5. Click OK

  6. In the Add Menu Item field, search and select your Plated Recipes

    1. The recipe cost will automatically pull through

    2. You can then set your ‘Sell Price’ to see your COG %

    3. The ‘Sell Price’ you enter should be GST inclusive. The displayed stock costs are GST exclusive so we deduct GST from your sell price before calculating your COGs

7. Repeat step six until you have entered all items for that menu group

8. Repeat steps four through six for other menu groups

9. Click Save

As supplier prices fluctuate on your stock items, Loaded automatically updates your COGS %. This is helpful when you’re planning your sale price, or refining your recipe costs. You can always check in on this to ensure your margins still align with your targets.

By default, menus display costs using Live Pricing. You can toggle between:

  • Live → Based on latest invoice prices

  • Forecast → Based on manually input price

You can read more about Live versus Forecast Pricing here.

Managing Your Menu

From Stock → Manage → Menu, click the menu you’ve created. At the top of the page, you’ll see options to print the full menu or individual recipes. You can also view and edit menu items, and see POS Item Links.

What’s Next?

Did this answer your question?