Free Restaurant Costing Template for Excel (UK Guide)

Written by: JJ Tan, Founder, Jelly

Key Takeaways

• A free restaurant costing Excel template needs five components: a master ingredient list, recipe costing, menu pricing with VAT handling, an overhead tab, and a price-update log.
• UK VAT rules require ingredient costs net of VAT and menu prices entered ex-VAT at 20% to prevent understating food cost percentage by up to 14%.
• Yield loss must be applied to every protein, fish and produce item, because ignoring trim and cooking loss understates true portion cost.
• Supplier prices move weekly in 2026, so manual spreadsheet updates quickly become unmanageable beyond a single site with a small supplier base.
• Jelly automates invoice scanning, live dish costing and daily margin reporting, giving operators measurable margin improvements within the first quarter.

See How Jelly Automates Your Costing

Five Components Every Free Restaurant Costing Template Needs

A complete UK restaurant costing template works best when it includes five components.

1. Master ingredient list, listing every SKU with pack size, pack price and supplier.
2. Recipe or plate costing, with dish builds that convert pack price into portion cost.
3. Menu pricing and margin calculator, showing selling price, VAT-exclusive price and GP percentage per dish.
4. Overhead and expense tab, covering rent, labour, utilities and delivery commissions.
5. Price-update log, recording every supplier price change with date, ingredient, movement and supplier.

The master ingredient list is the foundation: without accurate pack prices tied to real supplier SKUs, every downstream calculation becomes a guess. From there, the recipe tab converts those pack prices into portion costs by multiplying usable cost by recipe quantity. Those portion costs then feed into the menu pricing tab, which applies your VAT-exclusive selling price and calculates gross profit percentage.

The overhead tab captures fixed and variable costs including delivery aggregator commissions, which run at 14–30% of order value for Just Eat and Uber Eats and 25–35% for Deliveroo. That level of cost deserves its own line rather than being buried in food cost. The price-update log is the component most competitor templates skip, yet it is the only way to see whether your numbers reflect this week’s invoices or last quarter’s.

Tonight’s action: open a new workbook and create these five tabs before entering a single number.

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How To Calculate Restaurant Costing In Excel

This process builds a complete dish cost using a chicken curry as the worked example. The same logic applies to every dish in your starter .xlsx.

1. Enter pack price and pack size for each ingredient on the master ingredient list. For example, record a £10 pack of chicken breast at 1 kg.
2. Apply yield loss to convert pack price into usable cost. A chicken breast at 78% yield has a usable cost of £10 ÷ 0.78 = £12.82/kg, not £10. See the yield-loss section below for the full formula.
3. Build the recipe by listing each ingredient and its quantity per portion, such as 180 g of chicken, 100 g of onion and 50 ml of coconut cream.
4. Calculate portion cost by multiplying usable cost by quantity. In this example, 0.18 kg × £12.82 gives £2.31 for the chicken element alone.
5. Enter the VAT-exclusive selling price and calculate GP percentage. If the curry sells at £14.00 ex-VAT and total portion cost is £4.20, food cost percentage is 30% and GP is 70%.
6. Add a price-update log column to the master ingredient list recording the date each ingredient cost last changed.

A simple table showing these seven columns, ingredient, pack price, pack size, yield %, usable cost/kg, portion weight and portion cost, forms the core of any reliable recipe cost card. The starter .xlsx structures these columns for you.

Tonight’s action: build the chicken curry line by line in the starter file, using real invoice prices rather than estimates.

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How To Handle VAT In A UK Restaurant Costing Spreadsheet

VAT handling is the single most common silent margin killer in UK restaurant spreadsheets, and no ranking competitor template covers it properly.

Under UK VAT rules, all food and drink consumed on the premises is standard-rated at 20%. Hot takeaway food and hot drinks are also standard-rated at 20%, per HMRC VAT Notice 709/1. Supplier costs and menu selling prices therefore sit on different VAT bases, and mixing them distorts GP calculations.

The correct structure for a UK costing spreadsheet looks like this.

• Enter ingredient costs net of VAT. Most food ingredients are zero-rated at purchase, so input VAT is often nil on raw food, but alcohol, soft drinks and packaging carry input VAT that should be stripped before costing. If you only have gross prices, add a column that removes the 20% input VAT.
• Enter menu selling prices net of the 20% output VAT. A dish listed at £12.00 on the menu is £10.00 ex-VAT. GP must be calculated against the £10.00 figure, not £12.00, because the £2.00 VAT belongs to HMRC, not your margin. Calculating food cost percentage against the VAT-inclusive price understates food cost by 14% at the 20% standard rate.

Worked example: a chicken curry priced at £16.80 on the menu contains £2.80 of VAT. The ex-VAT selling price is £14.00. If portion cost is £4.20, food cost percentage is 30% rather than the 25% that appears if you calculate against £16.80.

Delivery aggregator commissions should appear as a separate overhead line in the expense tab. They should not be baked into food cost. On a £25 platform-delivered order at 30% commission, the commission alone is £7.50 before food cost is considered. That figure must sit visibly in the overhead tab so it informs delivery menu pricing separately from dine-in pricing.

Tonight’s action: add a VAT column to the master ingredient list and a VAT-exclusive price column to the menu pricing tab.

How To Account For Yield Loss And Trim In Recipe Costing

Pack price overstates usable cost. Trim, bone, skin, cooking loss and spoilage mean you receive less usable product than the invoice weight suggests. Ignoring yield loss is the single most common reason a free restaurant costing Excel template understates true dish cost.

The formula is straightforward.

Usable cost = pack price ÷ yield percentage (as a decimal)

Here are worked examples using UK kitchen benchmarks.

• Chicken breast (skin on): typical yield 85–90%. A £10/kg pack at 78% yield costs £12.82/kg usable.
• Whole salmon: typical yield 50–60% after filleting and skinning. At £12/kg and 55% yield, usable cost is £21.82/kg, and missing this yield step understates food cost across every fish dish on the menu.
• Beef sirloin (trimmed): typical yield 75–85%. At £18/kg and 80% yield, usable cost is £22.50/kg.

For ingredients that also lose weight during cooking, the two yields multiply rather than add: total yield = (1 − trim loss%) × (1 − cooking loss%). A chicken breast with 10% trim loss and 20% cooking loss does not yield 70%; it yields 72% (0.90 × 0.80). Applying only trim yield and ignoring cooking loss silently understates portion cost on every roasted, grilled or braised protein.

Add a yield percentage column to the master ingredient list. Every ingredient with meaningful trim, including proteins, fish, root vegetables and leafy greens, needs its own measured yield rather than a generic assumption.

Tonight’s action: add a yield percentage column to the master ingredient list and re-cost your three highest-volume dishes using measured yields rather than pack prices.

Keeping Your Template Accurate When Supplier Prices Change

A spreadsheet is only as accurate as its last update. The NIQ and Prestige Purchasing Foodservice Price Index recorded a 1.8% month-on-month rise in UK hospitality food and drink prices in June 2026. Fish and seafood rose 2.7%, and meat and poultry rose 2% in a single month. Proteins, seafood and produce can move weekly, while dairy and dry goods tend to move monthly or quarterly.

The manual burden of keeping a spreadsheet current is substantial. Someone must open every invoice, locate every affected line item, update every ingredient cell, then re-check every dish that uses it. On average, costing a single menu item takes 28 minutes in a spreadsheet. Operators running a medium-sized restaurant with 45 active recipes and 120 product lines face close to 40 hours of annual price-update work. That workload equals a full working week spent copying numbers between invoices and cells.

An out-of-date spreadsheet looks exactly like an up-to-date one. It fails silently, and operators keep making pricing and menu decisions on data that is no longer true. Many teams abandon the spreadsheet within weeks of building it because of this maintenance burden.

Tonight’s action: time yourself updating one supplier price change across every affected dish. Multiply that time by your weekly invoice count.

If that number feels uncomfortably high, you share the same challenge as many operators. At that point, the spreadsheet itself becomes the bottleneck, and automation starts to look like a practical next step.

When Spreadsheets Stop Working: The Case For Automation

Jelly is built for growing restaurants, pubs and boutique hotels that have reached this maintenance tipping point. It automates the entire flow from invoice to dish cost to margin reporting, replacing spreadsheet upkeep with live data.

• Automated invoice scanning: capture invoices by email or photo, digitise every line item, and push directly to Xero, delivering around a 90% reduction in bookkeeping time.
• Price Alert: once invoices are scanned, Price Alert instantly shows which ingredient prices have gone up or down, by how much and from which supplier, giving you the data needed to challenge a supplier or claim a credit note.
• Live dish costing: dish costs and GP margins update in real time as invoices arrive. Costing a menu item takes just 3 minutes in Jelly.
• Flash Report and Sales Mix: daily GP margin and menu profitability from POS integration with complementary tools, so you no longer wait for a monthly accountant report.
• Flat-rate pricing: £129/month per location, with no variable charge per user or feature.
• Onboarding in the first week: initial value from price alerts and spending insights arrives as soon as suppliers send invoices to a dedicated email address.

Jelly users cut food costs by 3% on average in the first three months and add 2 percentage points to gross margins. One operator improved gross profit from 65% to 72% within 12 weeks on approximately £500,000 in revenue. Murat Kilic, Chef-Owner of Amber in East London, saves £3,000–£4,000 per month: “Jelly keeps my business alive.”

Tonight’s action: calculate the annual hours your team spends on spreadsheet maintenance and multiply that figure by your hourly labour cost.

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Free Restaurant Costing Excel Templates Worth Downloading

Several free templates are available for UK operators, and each suits a different starting point.

• Eat App, best for operators who want a straightforward recipe cost card with selling price and food cost percentage. The structure is generic and not UK-specific on VAT.
• Spreadsheet123, best for operators comfortable with Excel who want a more detailed multi-tab layout. It is US-centric and requires manual VAT adjustment for UK use.
• Unilever Food Solutions, best for operators who want a template bundled with recipe inspiration. It uses generic yield assumptions and is not UK-specific.
• XenoSoft, best for operators who want a more structured cost card with batch sizing. It is generic and requires UK VAT and yield columns to be added manually.
• GetPrepsheet, best for UK operators, because it is built with £ pricing and some VAT awareness, making it the most immediately usable of the generic options for a UK kitchen.
• Marji, best for UK operators who want a clean, minimal layout. It offers UK-specific pricing but a limited overhead tab.
• UKSheets, best for UK operators who want a template with a pre-built overhead tab. It is UK-specific; check whether yield columns are included before use.

Before downloading any template, compare it against the five components listed above. Most generic templates cover components one to three and omit the overhead tab and price-update log entirely. UK-specific templates such as GetPrepsheet, Marji and UKSheets are the safest starting point because they use £ pricing and are more likely to reflect UK VAT treatment, but all still need the yield and VAT columns described in this guide to be accurate.

For deeper guidance on building and using these files, see Is Excel Effective For Restaurant Food Cost Tracking?, Restaurant Food Costing Excel Workbook For UK Margins, and How To Build A Recipe Costing Spreadsheet In Excel.

Tonight’s action: download two templates and compare their master ingredient list structure against the five components above.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Is There A Free Excel Template For Calculating Restaurant Food Costs?

Yes, several exist, including Eat App, Spreadsheet123, Unilever Food Solutions and XenoSoft. The key step is checking whether the template handles UK VAT and yield loss, which most generic templates do not. UK-specific options such as GetPrepsheet, Marji and UKSheets are better starting points for UK operators because they use £ pricing and are more likely to reflect UK VAT treatment, but all still need yield percentage columns and a VAT-exclusive selling price column to produce accurate GP figures.

How Do I Calculate Restaurant Costing?

Divide pack price by pack size to get cost per unit. Apply yield loss by dividing that cost by the yield percentage expressed as a decimal to get usable cost. Multiply usable cost by recipe quantity to get portion cost for each ingredient. Sum all ingredient portion costs to get total dish cost. Finally, divide by the VAT-exclusive selling price and multiply by 100 to get food cost percentage. For example, a dish with £3.60 total ingredient cost and a £12.00 ex-VAT selling price has a food cost percentage of 30% and a gross profit of 70%.

What Is The 50/30/20 Rule In Excel And How Does It Work?

The 50/30/20 rule is a personal budgeting framework, with 50% of income going to needs, 30% to wants and 20% to savings, and it does not apply to restaurant costing. Restaurant costing uses food cost percentage and gross profit margin as its primary metrics. A UK casual dining kitchen typically targets a food cost percentage of 28–35% and a gross profit of 65–72%, with prime cost (food plus labour) kept below 65–68% to leave room for rent, utilities and net profit.

How Often Should I Update My Costing Spreadsheet?

Update at minimum monthly for proteins, seafood and produce, and quarterly for dry goods and shelf-stable items. In practice, the correct trigger is any supplier price change, and in 2026 that means most weeks for proteins and fish. The NIQ and Prestige Purchasing Foodservice Price Index recorded broad-based price movements across virtually all food and beverage categories through the first half of 2026, with fish and seafood up 6.4% year-on-year and meat and poultry up 4.1% year-on-year by June 2026. A recipe costed in January at £4.20 may cost £5.10 by September after commodity movements, so without regular reviews margins erode silently.

When Should A Restaurant Move From A Spreadsheet To Dedicated Software?

The clearest signal comes when the time cost of maintaining the spreadsheet exceeds the cost of the software. Operators spending 10–20 hours per week on manual data entry, price checking, inventory and invoice reconciliation have usually passed the crossover point for moving from a spreadsheet to off-the-shelf or low-code software, which breaks even at 3.9–12.3 hours a week of team time, while custom builds, which need 8.8–25.4 hours a week, may not pay back at that level. Other clear triggers include expanding to a second site, adding delivery channels with separate margin structures, needing real-time GP visibility rather than monthly snapshots, or losing confidence that the spreadsheet reflects current supplier prices. At that point, a tool like Jelly, which costs £129/month per location and onboards within the first week, replaces the manual burden with automated invoice scanning, live dish costing and daily margin reporting.

Conclusion

Building a costing spreadsheet is a necessary first step for any UK kitchen, but the real challenge is keeping it accurate as supplier prices shift weekly. The five components and the VAT and yield adjustments covered here give you a reliable foundation. The open question is whether your team can maintain that accuracy manually as your menu and supplier base grow.

For single-site operators with a stable menu and a small supplier base, that maintenance burden can remain manageable for a while. For kitchens expanding to multiple sites, running delivery channels alongside dine-in, or losing hours each week to manual invoice work, the spreadsheet often becomes the constraint rather than the solution.

Jelly automates the flow from invoice to dish cost to margin report and delivers the margin improvements described earlier, without a six-month implementation or a consultant. For more on when spreadsheets stop working and what comes next, see Free Menu Costing Software: When Spreadsheets Stop Working.

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