How to record waste in tspoonlab
Recording waste is essential because it turns the kitchen's invisible loss into real financial data. By documenting every expired product, breakage, or production error, you stop writing off losses as "unexpected" and start pinpointing exactly where money leaks. This record is also the only way to keep your store's theoretical stock always up to date, ensuring your recipe-costing costs are real and letting you make strategic purchasing decisions to fine-tune your profit margins.
Step by step: recording waste in tspoonlab
First, create the waste types: go to the "Options" menu at the top right and click "Waste types".
Create the waste types you need: expiry, breakages, staff meals, bad practice, etc. Click the three-dot menu and select "Add waste type".
Then go back to the "Options" menu and select "Wastage".
Open the three-dot menu on the left of the search bar and select "New waste".
Choose the name of the waste "Folder" you want to create. For example, you can separate them by month, week, or day.
Click "Start" and start adding products, quantities, and waste type.
Then click "Finish". You'll see the total lost cost, and each of those exits will be deducted from the corresponding store.
Analyzing store deviations
A deviation is the financial and physical difference between the theoretical inventory (calculated by the software) and the real inventory (what you've counted).
The main causes of these deviations are:
Recipe-costing errors: dishes or recipes aren't calculated correctly; the real quantities used in the kitchen don't match the system's theoretical ones.
Poorly calculated operational waste: cleaning or breakdown processes (especially meat and fish) generate more waste than the technical sheet accounts for, or operational waste wasn't recorded in the waste section.
Unrecorded consumption: product exits not entered into the system, such as staff meals or informal transfers between the group's locations.
Best practice (FIFO policy): to reduce waste from expiry, implement the FIFO system (First In, First Out), ensuring the oldest stock is consumed before new orders.
💡 Tip: You now have tangible numbers to analyze. You can filter by clicking "%" in your inventory to sort by deviation percentage and focus on the products with the greatest deviation.
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