Recipes

A recipe is the ingredient breakdown behind every arrangement you create. It tells you exactly what goes into a bridal bouquet, table centre, or pedestal — and what it costs to make. Once you have recipes in place, pricing becomes automatic and your margins stay protected.

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What is a recipe?

A recipe is simply a list of ingredients that make up one arrangement. Think of it like a cooking recipe — instead of flour and eggs, you have stems, foliage, and sundries. For example, a “Bridal Bouquet” recipe might include:

• 10× White O’Hara Roses
• 5× Eucalyptus
• 3× White Lisianthus
• 1× Ribbon
• 1× Bouquet Wrap

Digital Florists adds up the cost of every ingredient and gives you the materials cost total — what you pay your suppliers. Apply your markup and you get the materials retail total — what you charge your client.

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Adding ingredients to a recipe

When you build or edit a recipe, you pick ingredients from the library you have already set up and enter how many you need.

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Ingredient snapshots

When you add an ingredient to a recipe, Digital Florists captures its cost and price at that moment. This is called a snapshot. If you later update the master ingredient (because your supplier changed their price, for example), existing quotes that already use that ingredient stay the same. The quote keeps the price that was correct at the time you built it. This stops old quotes from changing unexpectedly.

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Cost price vs retail price

Every ingredient has two prices:

• Cost price — what you pay your supplier for the ingredient.
• Retail price — what you charge your client for the ingredient.

When Digital Florists totals up a recipe, it shows both a materials cost total and a materials retail total so you can see your margin at a glance.

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The markup multiplier

The markup multiplier is the number Digital Florists uses to turn your cost into a retail price. It is simpler than it sounds. Worked example: Your ingredients cost £15 and your markup is set to 3×. The retail price becomes £15 × 3 = £45. That is your materials retail total for the recipe. You can also choose your pricing basis — whether the markup applies to the cost price or the retail price. This gives you flexibility depending on how your business works out its margins.

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Recipe categories

You can group your recipes into categories so they are easy to find and manage. Common categories include:

• Bouquets
• Table Centres
• Pedestals
• Ceremony Flowers
• Buttonholes & Corsages

Categories are completely flexible — name them whatever makes sense for your business.

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Design types

A design type is a label like “Bouquet”, “Table Centre”, or “Pedestal” that you assign to a recipe. Each design type carries a default labour percentage that Digital Florists uses to calculate labour costs automatically. For example, if the “Bouquet” design type has a default labour rate of 25%, Digital Florists adds 25% labour to every bouquet recipe — unless you override it.

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Labour

Labour covers the time and skill that goes into building each arrangement. It’s a recipe-level mechanic, set per recipe, and Digital Florists gives you three ways to calculate it.

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Labour modes

• Percentage of retail — labour scales with what you charge the client.
• Percentage of cost — labour scales with what the ingredients cost you.
• Fixed amount — a flat figure per item, regardless of price.

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Default labour from design types

When you set up your design types (like “Bouquet”, “Table Centre”, or “Pedestal”), you can assign a default labour percentage to each one. When you add an item with that design type to your quotation, the labour is filled in automatically. You can still override the labour on any individual recipe item if a particular arrangement needs more or less work than the default.

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Categorise your labour

If you’d rather add labour as a line-item ingredient (instead of using a labour mode on the recipe), tag the ingredient with the Labour category. Digital Florists uses ingredient categories to break down your costs at the end of an event, so you can see how much of your total went on labour, flowers, foliage, and so on. Untagged ingredients appear as unclassified items.

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Build labour into your templates

If you use quotation templates, set the labour mode and percentage on each recipe in the template. When you load the template for a new event, the labour is already in place. Include setup and teardown time too, especially for items like pew ends or arches that take significant effort to install on site.

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Protecting your margins

Supplier prices change — that is the reality of working with fresh flowers. When an ingredient price goes up, you can:

• Raise the recipe’s retail price to keep your margin the same.
• Swap in a different ingredient if a cheaper alternative works just as well.
• Absorb the increase if the change is small enough to accept.

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Common questions

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What’s next?