A 70 per cent GP on a £3.20 plate is £12.80, not £10.67

Menu Price and GP Calculator

Plate cost and target GP in, menu price out, with the VAT that menu prices include and spreadsheets forget. Skip that step and 70 per cent quietly earns 64.

Free tool

Menu Price and GP Calculator

From plate cost and target GP to the menu price, with the VAT that menu prices include and most spreadsheets forget.

£
Ingredients on the plate, from the Plate Costing Calculator.
%
Measured on the ex-VAT price, which is the convention every buyer uses.
%
20 for eat-in. Zero only for cold takeaway food.
£
Leave as is to see the demo dish, or enter yours to see the GP it really earns.

The error this page exists to kill

Menu prices include VAT. GP is measured on the ex-VAT price. Divide the plate cost by one minus the GP and you have the ex-VAT price; forget to add the VAT back and the menu quietly gives a fifth of the revenue to HMRC twice.

Priced the forgotten way, a 70 per cent target earns about 64, and six points of GP on a busy dish is thousands of pounds a year.

GP percentages steer, pounds pay bills: a 65 per cent dish earning £9 of cash margin beats an 80 per cent dish earning £4. The Menu Engineering Workbook ranks the whole menu both ways.

Take the workbook

The same arithmetic in Excel for a whole menu: eight demo dishes, target GP each, the price that hits it and the GP your current prices really earn.

Download the workbook Excel, no signup

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