Recipe Scaling

When you enter a recipe from BYO, Zymurgy, Brewing Classic Styles, etc, do you add it using some standard equipment profile and then scale it to your equipment profile?  If so, what do use as the "standard" profile?  If not, what is your process?

If found that the most important thing to pay attention to is the efficiency listed in the original recipe. Enter the recipe as written and with the given efficiency, than scale to your equipment setup with your efficiency, BeerSmith will take care of the rest. You should go through the equipment wizard to set up your equipment profile. Efficiency estimates come after a few brews, but I've found that about 70 percent is a good place to start (IMHO).  Hope this helps, happy brewing.
  Mitch

Thanks!  I agree that efficiency is very important. I would think volumes and losses would be important also. Most recipes are given for 5, 5.5 or 6 gallons. I usually brew 3.5 gals. Also, Jamil makes a point that he looses .5 gallons in from the mash tun to the kettle, .5 from the kettle to the fermentor and .5 from the fermentor to the keg. Everyone's losses would be different.

Yea I've found the losses to be a little tougher to nail down. I ended up having to set my loss to trub/chiller to zero than just upping my batch size to account for the loss from kettle to fermenter, that way the recipes are adjusting to the pre-boil volume which I think gives the best estimates to hit the right gravities. I always figure that as long as the recipe after being scaled to my equipment has the same OG as the original, than I'll be good to go, and it hasn't failed me yet. From the research I've done it seems the most important thing when scaling recipes is to hit those gravity marks to ensure you're brewing the right kind of style.