Recipe units: grams, litres and "each"

A recipe only saves you money if the numbers in it mean something. Until now they half did: you could type "2 kg" of mince, and Aura would take two off the shelf — two grams, two bags, two of whatever mince happened to be counted in. The unit was decoration.

Now every quantity has a unit, and Aura converts it for you.

Say how each thing is counted

Every product has a Counted in setting (product editor, under Track stock). There are three choices, and only three:

Grams and millilitres rather than kilograms and litres, deliberately. A recipe that uses 250 g of a product counted in kilograms would need a quarter of a unit, and quarters do not survive in a stock figure — the rounding turns into drift you find at stocktake. So the shelf is counted in the small unit, and the screen shows you the friendly one: 24 000 g reads back as "24 kg".

Write recipes the way you talk

The recipe editor asks for a quantity and a unit per line, and offers the units that make sense for that ingredient: g or kg for something weighed, ml/l/cl/tbsp/tsp for something poured, each for something counted. A tablespoon is 15 ml and a teaspoon is 5 ml.

So a batch of bolognese reads: 2 kg beef mince, 1500 ml passata, twenty portions, 5% waste. Aura shows you what one plate actually takes — 105 g of mince — and that is what comes off the shelf when the dish sells. Before this, that same recipe deducted nothing at all: two units divided by twenty portions rounded down to zero, so the mince never ran low, never took the dish off the menu, and food-cost variance reported a kitchen with no waste. A recipe that appears to work and silently does nothing is worse than no recipe.

Nobody has to set units up front

The first recipe line to measure a product decides how it is counted: writing "200 g of flour" is you telling Aura that flour is stocked by mass, and it saves that. After that Aura holds you to it — grams for flour, millilitres for oil.

What it will not do is guess between them. There is no conversion from millilitres to grams without knowing what the thing is, so asking for 200 ml of flour is refused rather than converted on an assumption. If you do need to change how something is counted, and recipes already measure it the old way, Aura names those recipes and asks you to fix them first — changing it underneath them would restate what every one of them deducts.

Kitchen stores

Raw goods are products too, but you never sell them. In the demo they are set up as products with Active switched off: that keeps them off the till grid and the customer menu while inventory, purchasing and recipes still see them normally. Give them a cost per base unit — mince at 12c a gram is R120/kg — and food cost comes out right on its own.

Recipes written before this change

Aura did not go back and multiply old numbers, on purpose: taking every old "kg" at its word would have multiplied a live kitchen's consumption by a thousand overnight. Those lines still deduct exactly what they deducted yesterday, and the recipe list flags them as needs review, showing what the line says against what it actually takes. Re-save the recipe with a real quantity and unit and the flag clears.