Ingredients & Units

Every stock number in the system hangs off an ingredient record. Set these up carefully once and everything downstream — purchasing, recipes, counting, costing — inherits the care.

The ingredient record#

An ingredient carries its name, category, units (below), applicable tax, and its stock-control levels: alert quantity (feeds the low stock report), re-order quantity, and maximum. Flags distinguish food items, manufacturing/prepared items, and items not for selling (packaging, cleaning supplies — stocked and consumed, never sold). Retired ingredients are deactivated, not deleted — their history stays.

There is no price field to maintain here by hand: cost comes from purchases (and from production for prepared items), tracked per branch by the costing engine.

Bulk import exists for onboarding a long ingredient list from a spreadsheet.

Ingredient categories#

Categories do more than group the list:

• each category names its inventory ledger account — so flour and cleaning supplies can sit in different asset heads;
• each category lists its allowed kitchen departments — this is how the system knows the grill orders meat and the bar orders lemons. Department-scoped screens (issuance, department adjustments, counts) offer only the ingredients whose category allows that department.

Units and conversions#

Units live in a proper units master with base units and sub-units — a sub-unit points at its base with a multiplier (1 kg = 1000 g, 1 carton = 24 pcs). Per ingredient you choose:

• the base unit — what stock is counted and recipes are written in;
• the allowed sub-units — the other units screens may use;
• the default purchase unit — buy in cartons, stock in pieces, and every purchase line converts automatically.

Get the base unit right first — it's the unit of every count, recipe line and report. (The adjustment reasons even include unit conversion error for the cleanups this prevents.)

Stock levels, per branch and department#

Alert/re-order/max levels set on the ingredient are the global defaults; the "Inv" button on the ingredient list opens per-branch (and per-department) overrides — the flagship's flour alert level shouldn't be the kiosk's. The low-stock report respects whichever level applies. The same screen shows current stock per location — note the ingredient list's stock column shows the branch store's holding, with department holdings visible in the department screens.

Expiry#

Where the business enables product expiry, purchase lines carry expiry dates and the stock expiry report lists what's approaching or past date; production's expiry labels cover prepared batches. Expiry is tracked at the purchase-line level — there is no per-batch stock tracking beyond it.

Recipes, briefly#

Recipes are where ingredients meet the menu, and they're documented with Menu & Kitchen. The facts that matter from the inventory side: menu recipes are per variant (the large pizza's recipe, not "pizza's"), add-ons carry their own recipes, deals consume through their component items, and prepared ingredients have their own internal sub-recipes (nested — a sauce made from a paste made from tomatoes resolves all the way down).