Know what every dish really costs you.
Supplier prices creep up a few cents at a time, and your menu prices don't. Send us 5 recent invoices and 3 menu items, and we'll show you your true cost per dish, your real margin, and where it's quietly leaking. Free.
No card, no catch. We're a small new NZ startup building a tool for this, and the audits help us get it right.
Price creep spotted
Illustrative numbers only, not from a real café.
The problem with costing a menu
Plenty of café owners cost their menu once, maybe in a spreadsheet, and never get the time to redo it. Meanwhile:
- Prices change every invoice. Eggs, butter, coffee, dairy — small rises add up, and nobody has time to check every line.
- Spreadsheets go stale. Keeping recipe costs up to date means typing prices in by hand, week after week.
- The proper tools are pricey. Software that reads invoices and updates recipe costs is usually built for bigger groups, with prices to match.
The result: you find out your margins have slipped when the bank balance tells you, not when it happens.
How the free audit works
Three steps, about 10 minutes of your time.
Tell us about your café
Fill in the short form below. We'll reply by email with where to send your files.
Send 5 invoices + 3 dishes
Photos or PDFs of 5 recent supplier invoices, plus 3 menu items with rough recipes (ingredients and amounts). Phone photos are fine.
Get your margin report
Usually within 5 working days, we'll email you a plain-English report: true cost per dish, margin %, and the biggest price creeps.
What you get
Here's roughly what your report will look like. This one is a made-up example so you can see the format.
Based on 5 supplier invoices and 3 menu items. Costs and margins are ex-GST.
| Dish | Menu price (ex GST) | Cost to make | Margin | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Eggs Benedict | $21.30 | $7.85 | 63% | Slipping |
| Big Breakfast | $23.48 | $10.40 | 56% | Below target |
| Flat white (regular) | $4.78 | $1.12 | 77% | Healthy |
- True cost per dish, worked out from your actual invoice prices
- Margin % for each dish, so you can see which ones pull their weight
- Biggest price creeps across your suppliers, line by line
- A few practical suggestions — portion, price or supplier — that you're free to ignore
Want this every week, automatically?
We're building TallyDish so you can just photograph or forward each supplier invoice. It'll read the line items, update what each dish costs, and give you a heads-up when a price rise starts eating your margin.
It isn't finished yet. If you'd like it, you can become a founding café now:
- NZ$29/month per site, locked in for as long as you stay
- Early access as features are ready, and a real say in what we build
- Cancel any time — full refund if we don't launch
per site · price locked for life
excl. GST if applicable
The free audit doesn't require this.
Questions
What happens to my invoices?
We use them only to prepare your audit. We don't sell or share them, and we won't use your business name or numbers anywhere without asking. We use AI tools to help read your invoices and do the sums. You can ask us to delete your files at any time, and we delete them within 90 days of sending your report anyway. Full details are in our privacy policy.
Is it really free? What's the catch?
Really free. We're testing whether cafés want a tool like this before we build all of it, and doing audits is how we learn what matters to you. We may ask for your honest feedback afterwards.
What happens after the audit?
You keep the report. We'll ask whether it was useful and, if you're keen, tell you about the founding café plan. If you're not interested, that's the end of it — no pushy follow-ups.
Who's behind TallyDish?
We're a small, new startup based in Aotearoa New Zealand. We're upfront that we're just getting started: no big claims, just a useful report. Operations are AI-assisted, which is how we can offer audits for free.
Do I need to be in NZ?
We're starting with independent cafés and small restaurants in New Zealand and Australia. If you're elsewhere, get in touch anyway.
What if my recipes aren't written down?
No worries. Rough is fine — "2 eggs, 2 slices sourdough, about 40 g spinach" is all we need. We'll note any assumptions in the report.
Request your free margin audit
Takes a minute. We'll reply by email (usually within 1 working day) with where to send your invoices and recipes.