Recipes & Ingredients

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.

​

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

The system 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.

​

Adding ingredients to a recipe

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

​

Ingredient snapshots

When you add an ingredient to a recipe, the system 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.

​

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 the system 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.

​

The markup multiplier

The markup multiplier is the number the system 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.

​

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.

​

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 which the system uses to calculate labour costs automatically. For example, if the “Bouquet” design type has a default labour rate of 25%, the system knows to add 25% labour to every bouquet recipe — unless you override it.

​

Labour calculation

Labour is the charge for the time it takes to create an arrangement. The system gives you three ways to handle it:

• Auto mode — Uses the default percentage from the recipe’s design type. If your design type is set to 25% and the retail price is £100, the system adds £25 for labour.
• Manual percentage — Override the default and set your own percentage for a specific recipe. Useful when an arrangement takes more (or less) time than usual.
• Fixed amount — Ignore percentages altogether and set a flat labour charge in pounds. Good for arrangements where the labour is always the same regardless of the flower cost.

​

The Shopping List

Once your orders and events have recipes attached, the Shopping List pulls together every ingredient you need for the day. It adds up all the stems, bunches, and sundries across every order, so you know exactly what to pull from the cooler before you start work. You can find the Shopping List on your Dashboard.

​

Protecting your margins

Supplier prices change — that is the reality of working with fresh flowers. When an ingredient price goes up, the system flags every recipe that uses that ingredient. You can then decide how to respond:

• Raise your 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.

​

Common questions

​

What’s next?