Two halves facing opposite ways
Two rivals are a half on recipe costing. One counts stock without recipes; the other has recipes and variance with no costing. One letter cannot say which.
One row in our comparison table reads ingredient-level recipe costing, stock taken by dish. Two rivals sit in it as a half. Until Friday the note under the row explained the half one way: stock counts exist without recipe-level depletion being described. That was written for a general-purpose till whose inventory module counts items and lets you set par levels, and it was true of it.
Friday’s read of a second rival’s site put a half in the same row for the opposite reason. One of their case studies describes managing ingredients, raising purchase orders, transferring stock between bars, recipe management and variance reports between projected and real counts. That is more than counts. It is recipes and the depletion the first note said was missing. What it does not describe is costing: what a dish costs from the ingredients in it, theoretical gross profit against the actual figure, or a supplier invoice photographed into a delivery with its prices read off.
Why the row did not split
The tempting fix is two rows, one for counting and one for costing, so each rival gets a tick in one and a dash in the other. But the row exists because, for a food hall, the two are one question. Stock taken by dish only tells you anything when each dish carries its ingredients and each ingredient carries a price, because the number an operator wants at the end of the week is what the food actually cost against what the menu said it should. Half of that is half, whichever half it is.
So the row stays as one, the cell stays as one letter, and the note under it now carries both directions in two sentences: half means counts without recipe-level depletion, and this rival’s half is the other way about, with recipes and variance against projected counts and no costing. A reader who cares can see exactly what each rival describes and what it does not. A reader skimming sees two halves and is not misled by either.
The general rule
A one-letter cell compresses a paragraph of reading, and compression loses something every time. The note is where the lost part goes. If two companies earn the same letter for different reasons, the note has to name both, or the table has quietly told the reader that two different products are the same. Our own column gets the same treatment: where we are a cross, the note says what the cross means and what still works.