Consumption

Consumption is the biggest stock movement in any food business — by an order of magnitude, in real deployments. It's the automatic conversion of what you sold into what you used, through recipes.

Estimated, all day#

While the day runs, the Total Estimated Consumption report explodes the day's sales through recipes and shows theoretical usage so far — per ingredient, printable to the kitchen (the daily inventory report variant formats it for exactly that). Ingredient-wise consumption answers the reverse question: for one ingredient, which menu items are eating it. And Stock Need To Be Issued compares estimated needs against department holdings — the store's picking list for the next issuance round.

These are estimates — read-only arithmetic, moving no stock.

Actual, at day close#

The real consumption run happens with the day close: the business day's completed sales are exploded through recipes — variants, add-ons, deal components, nested sub-recipes — and posted as consumption, valued by your costing method. The day close supervises the run, shows its progress, and won't finalize past a failure. This is the path that keeps stock true without anyone typing a single quantity.

Two consumption modes#

A business runs one of two models:

• Branch-level — consumption draws on the branch's stock directly. The simple model; most businesses.
• Department issuance mode — stock is issued to kitchen departments first, and consumption draws on department holdings. This mode adds the Consume Department Stock action: a manual consumption run for a chosen time window, for operations that consume departments on their own rhythm rather than only at day close.

Wastage is consumption too#

A burned pizza consumed its ingredients even though nobody paid for it. Food wastage entries record wasted prepared items and consume their recipes; ingredient wastage (a minus adjustment) records raw losses directly. Both are visible expense lines — and the day close checklist nudges branches whose wastage habit goes quiet.

There is deliberately no bare "consume X quantity" form. Every consumption has a story — a sale, a batch, a wastage, an adjustment with a reason — because unexplained consumption is exactly what food-cost control exists to eliminate.