Cost Brain

Cost Brain is easy to use. It is a cheap and easy solution for costing out all my recipes and creating valuable reports. Every invoice I scan in gets saved digital. Then those costs get relayed over to my recipes making it easy to manage my costs. This was also a great way to go back and review my invoices so i could compare how costs had changed between them. They also allow you to enter in all your recipes and even calculate how much employee cost has gone into prep time based on an average of the employees skill set.

There are still some features that need fine tuning. The OCR required a little effort on my part to make sure all the scanned inputs were correct. They allow me to digitally translate my invoice but some values would come in incorrect making me have to make sure that everything was correct. However this was a lot easier then entering everything in manually. I think one thing they might want to consider is a way to export what we've entered in. You are committed to their system once you start entering in data. But on the plus side at least you have a great place to view the data as everything is stored on the cloud.

Overall I would recommend trying out this software. They allow you to try the software for free so there is nothing to lose. It is not a total management solution for a restaurant but it can help you understand your food costs and scan in your invoices relatively easy. They were pretty responsive to help me figure out how to use it so there is really nothing to lose in at least trying it out. Just make sure not to get too deep into the software unless you are committing. It can be a lot of work adding in all your recipes. As far as I know there may not be anyway to actually export all your data once you've inputed it.