Paying yourself for your time
This article shows you how to see what each of your prices pays you per hour, and spot the ones that don't pay enough.
Steps
Open Settings, Pricing and orders, Your hourly rate. Enter what you want to pay yourself per hour, in your own currency.
Make it at least your local minimum wage. A good test: what would you have to pay someone else to do this work?
Open a recipe in the Recipe book, click "Edit recipe" and fill in "Hands-on time for one batch" in hours and minutes. Click Done.
Count the time you spend working on the batch: weighing, mixing, shaping, decorating, packing, and setting up and washing up. Leave out oven or setting time if you're free to do something else meanwhile. If you have to stand over it, count it.
- On the recipe's Costing tab you'll now see your time per batch, what it costs per item at your hourly rate, and "Ingredients and your time" per item.
- Under Prices, each price list shows "Pays you … an hour before running costs". That's what's left after ingredients, spread over your hands-on time. If it's less than your hourly rate, it's in red with the price that would pay your rate.
- To check every recipe at once, open Recipes, Pricing. The "Pays you" column shows the hourly figure for each price, in red where it's below your rate. Recipes without a time show "Add time".
Your price list formulas and your prices don't change. This is a check, so you decide what to do about a price that doesn't pay enough: put it up, find a quicker way to make it, or stop making it.
The hourly figure is before running costs like rent and insurance, which also have to come out of what's left after ingredients. Add those on the Running costs page.
Common issues
- "Pays you" isn't showing: add the recipe's hands-on time in Edit recipe. Nothing is flagged red until you've set your hourly rate in Settings.
- Pays you is missing on Pricing for some people on your team: it's hidden when "Hide cost figures" is on in Settings, Appearance.