Understanding pricing tiers and suggested prices
This article explains how pricing tiers, suggested prices, and actual prices relate to each other.
Before you start
Have at least one pricing tier and one recipe with a calculated cost per portion.
Steps
- Each pricing tier has a formula producing a suggested minimum price only: a multiple of cost, cost plus a fixed amount, or a value relative to another tier (base tier, plus/minus direction, and a percentage or fixed magnitude). It's a floor meant to stop accidental underpricing, not a recommendation that suits every item.
- Every recipe carries a real, manually-set price per tier. This is what's actually charged. New recipes start from the suggestion.
Use the Pricing screen for bulk work across every recipe: a flat table (Recipe, Tier, Cost, Suggested min., Actual Price, Gross Margin) with filters and an accept-suggested-minimum bulk action for selected rows. If the table runs wide on your screen, use the collapse-sidebar control at the top of the left-hand navigation to reclaim width.
The Pricing screen's bulk table with Cost, Suggested min., Actual Price, and Gross Margin columns Use Recipe Book's own per-recipe pricing section for single-recipe editing.
A recipe's own Pricing section in Recipe Book, showing the same columns for a single recipe
What to expect
A cost change updates the Suggested min. column immediately, but Actual Price only changes when you (or a bulk accept) explicitly update it. If you manually set an Actual Price below the suggested minimum, a warning icon appears next to it as a caution. It's still saved, just flagged.
Common issues
- Confused why suggested and actual don't match: that's expected. Suggested min. is a live reference floor only, actual is what's genuinely charged until you choose to update it.
- Margin shown looks lower than expected: it's gross margin specifically, labelled that way to avoid confusion with the "multiple of cost" markup input next to it.