Novus Restaurant
Cost a menu against your own invoices
The public price data is only half of Novus Restaurant. The signed-in workspace takes your own purchase records and costs a recipe from them, flags the supplier price moves that actually cost you money, and proposes switches only where the comparison is genuinely like for like.
Everything in the first two tutorials is public and needs no account. This one is about the other half of the product: a free signed-in workspace that works on YOUR numbers rather than on the published market series. The two are deliberately separate, and it is worth understanding why before you start.
Published market data tells you what an agency observed in a market. It cannot tell you what you paid, because nobody publishes that. So the workspace asks you to bring your own purchase records, and then it is careful — sometimes frustratingly careful — about what it will compare them against.
Contents
Two ways to finish
Cost a recipe
Import purchases, build a recipe, and see the plate cost that follows from them.
Find what changed
Rank supplier price moves by what they actually cost you per week.
- 1
1. Create the account, and know what it is for
The workspace lives at /app and needs a free account; the data explorer, country pages, coverage, methodology and the data-source registry do not, and never will. Sign up at restaurant.novusstreamsolutions.com/sign-up.
This is the one app in the Novus portfolio that is not browser-first, and the reason is structural rather than a preference. Aggregating what other institutions publish on their own schedules needs server-side ingestion; there is no version of that which runs entirely in a tab. The hub says so rather than copying the "your files never leave your device" promise that is true of the other eight apps.
- Public tier: explorer, country pages, coverage, methodology, data sources. No account.
- Workspace: your own purchase and recipe records. Free, but signed in.
- 2
2. Import your purchase records
Open Data imports and bring in what you actually bought: supplier, item, unit, currency, quantity and price. Every later feature in the workspace is derived from these rows, so the quality of what you import sets the ceiling on everything else.
Pay attention to the unit column in particular. The workspace will not convert between units or currencies on your behalf, and that is deliberate: a silent conversion is indistinguishable from a correct number right up until it is wrong by a factor of twelve.
- Supplier, normalized item, unit and currency are the four fields every comparison keys on.
- Novus does not guess unit or currency conversions. Import what the invoice says.
- 3
3. Build a recipe and read the plate cost
Menu costing prices each recipe quantity from the latest matching imported purchase unit. Add a menu item first, then build its recipe against the items you imported.
When a line will not price, the cause is almost always that no imported purchase matches on unit. That is the same refusal as the one above, surfacing where you can act on it: the fix is a purchase record in the unit the recipe uses, not a conversion the software invented.
- Each quantity is priced from the LATEST matching purchase, so the plate cost moves as your invoices do.
- An unpriced line means no matching unit was imported, not that the feature failed.
- 4
4. Rank price changes by what they actually cost you
Price changes compares prices only within the same supplier, the same normalized item, the same unit and the same currency. Four keys, all of which must match. A comparison that crosses any of them is not made at all rather than made loosely.
The default ordering is the part worth internalising: absolute weekly financial impact, not percentage movement. A 30% rise on a garnish you buy twice a month is a smaller problem than a 4% rise on the oil you go through every day, and a list sorted by percentage puts them the wrong way round. This one sorts by the money.
- Same supplier, same item, same unit, same currency — or no comparison.
- Sorted by weekly cost impact, so the top of the list is the thing worth a phone call.
- 5
5. Treat savings as candidates, not instructions
Savings opportunities compares exact normalized item names ACROSS suppliers, and only where the currency and the purchase unit also match. It is the one place the workspace looks outside a single supplier, and it is correspondingly stricter about what counts as the same thing.
Every candidate still requires operator review, and the product says so on the page. It knows the price and the unit; it does not know that one supplier delivers on Tuesdays, or that the cheaper flour behaves differently in your dough. The list is a shortlist for a human, which is the honest limit of what a price comparison can be.
- Cross-supplier, but only on an exact normalized item name with matching currency and unit.
- Every candidate is reviewed by you. The tool does not switch anything.
Why the workspace refuses so much
Nearly every limit in this workspace is the same decision repeated: it will not compare two things unless the supplier, the normalized item, the unit and the currency all line up, and it will not convert between units or currencies to force a match. That feels restrictive on day one and it is the reason the numbers are worth anything on day ninety. A costing tool that quietly converts pounds to kilograms, or compares a case price against a unit price, produces a plate cost that looks precise and is wrong — and you will not find out from the tool. Import the unit your invoice actually uses, and let the blanks stay blank until a real match exists.
Frequently asked questions
Quick answers to common questions about this topic.
Does the workspace use the public market data?
No. Menu costing, price changes and savings all run on the purchase records you import. The published market series are a separate, public product; mixing the two would let an agency observation stand in for a price you never paid.
Why will a recipe line not price?
Because no imported purchase matches it on unit. Novus does not convert units, so the line stays unpriced until a purchase record in that unit exists.
Is the workspace free?
Yes. It needs an account and there is no paid tier. The public data explorer needs no account at all.
Why is a big percentage rise below a small one in the list?
Because the default order is absolute weekly financial impact rather than percentage. A small rise on something you buy constantly costs more than a large rise on something you rarely order.
Related workflow
Turn a market movement into a menu price you can defend
Start from a published food-price movement, check it is real before acting on it, and end with a costed menu sheet you can hand to a supplier or an accountant.
- Find the movement and check it is publishableNovus Restaurant: Read the observation with its published date and source identifier, then check the provider is healthy and the series is fresh for its cadence; a flat line can mean a stable price or an absent publisher, and only cadence tells you which.
- Build the costing sheet and sign itNovus PDF Studio: Assemble the figures into a document, add the fields a supplier or accountant fills in, and sign it locally so nothing leaves your device.
Related troubleshooting
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