Vinzo: Food Cost and Margin Control for Hospitality Venues

Context

A venue's food cost is recalculated, in practice, once or twice a year - a spreadsheet exercise someone does with last season's invoices. In between, suppliers change prices continuously, pack sizes change, the same ingredient arrives under three different names, and the recipe costs in the spreadsheet quietly stop matching reality.

The Problem

• Invoices stay on paper: a folder of supplier invoices nobody types in, so the prices used for costing are the prices from months ago.
• Margin is a guess: the chef knows which dishes sell, not which ones earn - and the two lists are rarely the same one.
• Nothing is comparable: one supplier quotes per kilo, another per pack of six, a third per case - without normalised units a price rise is invisible.

The Goal

One platform where an invoice becomes updated ingredient prices without anyone typing, every dish carries a live gross profit against its target, and the operator is told each morning which prices moved, which margins moved with them and where the next saving is.

Four Ways to Get an Invoice In

The friction in food costing is data entry, so capture has four doors. Upload a PDF, JPG, PNG or HEIC; photograph the invoice on a phone at the delivery door; drop a multi-page scan and say whether it is one invoice across pages or one invoice per file; or simply forward the supplier's email to the venue's own inbox address, which can be rotated at any time if it leaks. Whichever door it comes through, the invoice lands in the same review queue with the name of whoever sent it attached.

Several AI Readers, and They Have to Agree

One model reading a crumpled delivery note is a guess; several models reading it and being compared is a confidence score. Where the readers disagree on a value, the field is flagged for a human with the alternatives offered - pick one or type it. On top of that, every line is checked arithmetically (quantity × unit price against the line total) and the lines are reconciled against the invoice's own net, with the difference shown. The document sits side by side with the extracted fields, zoomable and rotatable, and approval is recorded with who approved it and when.

The Price Book Maintains Itself

Every approved invoice line becomes a price in the ingredient price book. Each product carries its unit, its current price, its 90-day average, the change against the last purchase and against that average, which suppliers sell it, how many dishes use it and when it was last bought - sortable by biggest change, so the week's movers come to the top. The raw invoice text each product came from stays visible, and because suppliers name the same thing three ways, duplicate SKUs can be merged into one ingredient.

Recipes, Including the Ones Inside Recipes

A kitchen does not only cost finished dishes. Béchamel, pizza dough and stock are prep items - sub-recipes with their own batch cost and yield, which produce a cost per kilo or per litre that then flows into every dish using them. Dishes and prep items sit together grouped by menu section, each card showing cost against price and an honest status when something is missing: no recipe yet, or a recipe whose ingredients are not all priced.

The Menu, Scored Green, Amber or Red

The menu is the answer screen. Each dish shows its selling price, the price net of VAT at the venue's own rate, the ingredient cost from the live price book, the resulting gross profit, the target it is measured against, a Green/Amber/Red status, a trend and its monthly volume. It filters by status, by menu section and by what is missing, so the list of dishes below target is one click away - and targets themselves can be set in bulk rather than dish by dish.

Opening a Dish: Where the Cost Actually Is

A dish's own page breaks the number apart. KPI tiles for selling price, net price, ingredient cost, GP and target - with the target naming its own source. Then the recipe table sorted by line cost, each ingredient with its quantity, unit, unit price, line cost and share of the dish's cost, so the two lines that are 70% of the plate are at the top. Units cover grams, kilos, millilitres, litres, each, and the pour sizes a bar actually uses. A cost history chart adds a point at every price change, next to a plain-language account of what changed and advice on what to do about it. A sales estimate turns that per-plate margin into money per month.

A Briefing Instead of a Dashboard Habit

Nobody opens a reporting tool every morning, so the platform comes to them. At the briefing time the venue sets, Vinzo generates a summary of the price and margin changes since the last one - and only those above the venue's own alert threshold, because a 0.4% move on flour is noise. A headline card states the day in one sentence, period tabs widen it to the week, month, quarter or year, menu GP over the last 90 days sits alongside with how much of the menu is actually costed, and a briefing can be generated on demand when someone wants it now.

Which Supplier Is Actually Stable

Approved invoices add up into supplier analytics over 30, 90 or 365 days. A stacked spend-by-month chart shows the top suppliers with the rest collected as Other, net of VAT, with a written summary beside it. Per supplier: total spend, invoice count, how many products, how many price rises - and a stability score built from how many of their products changed price, the average size of the largest move, and the balance of rises against falls. That is the difference between the cheapest supplier and the one you can build a menu price on.

Savings, Ranked by What They Are Worth

Analysis that does not end in an action is a report. The savings module turns what the invoices reveal into suggestions ranked biggest first, each with a monthly value, so the first one on the list is the one worth doing this week. Available savings per month sit next to what has actually been achieved this month and this year, suggestions move through Open, Done and Dismissed, a minimum-value filter hides the ones not worth a conversation, and a sidebar badge counts what is still open so the list is not forgotten.

The Eight Steps from Nothing to a Costed Menu

Food costing software usually dies at setup, so onboarding is a product in itself: venue details, a bulk import of historic invoices, the menu, a product review, recipes, sales estimates, the target gross profit, and then the step that does the work. Vinzo links recipe ingredients to invoice products automatically wherever the name is unambiguous and the units are compatible, and leaves everything ambiguous or unmatched visible for a human to resolve instead of guessing silently. Then it costs the menu and prepares the first briefing.

One Organisation, Many Venues, Different Trust

A group does not give the kitchen porter the billing screen. Built-in Owner, Manager, Staff and Read-only roles can be extended with custom ones, and the permission matrix sets View, Create, Edit and Approve independently for each module. One rule makes it genuinely useful: without View, a person only sees the invoices they added themselves - which is exactly how you let staff photograph deliveries without opening the venue's supplier terms to them. Each venue then has its own country, currency, VAT rate on menu prices, cuisine, alert threshold, default target GP and briefing time, with a venue switcher across the top.