Setup Guide: Inventory Management
Inventory Management connects your menu to what you actually buy, so you can see your food cost in real time and track stock as it sells. This guide is the running order — each step links to the full article for that screen.
Tip: Set up recipes and run them for a few weeks before you start tracking stock. Food costing is useful on its own, and it gives you time to get your ingredient costs right before stock levels depend on them.
Before you start
- Your menu must be entered and priced.
- Decide where you are setting this up. The steps below must be done at the level where your menu lives — if you use a Company menu, do this at Company level; if your stores have their own menus, do it at store level.
Note: If you have already entered a Cost Price against a product, creating a recipe for it will overwrite that value.
Glossary
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| Unit | The fraction of the base quantity your ingredients are measured in — kg, g, l, ml. |
| Ingredient | A component used to make a product. |
| Recipe | The set of ingredients that makes a product. |
| Batch recipe | A set of ingredients making part of a product, where that part is used across several products — a sauce, a marinade. |
The running order
Each step depends on the one before it, so work through them in order.
1. Add your suppliers
Set up the suppliers you buy from, so ingredients and stock orders can be linked to them.
See Managing Suppliers.
2. Set your ingredient types, units and target food cost
Under Setup > Inventory Setup, review:
- Ingredient Types — prepopulated with common types; add your own if you need them.
- Ingredient Units — prepopulated with common units; add your own if you need them.
- Target Food Cost % — set under Setup > Inventory Setup > Setup, at Company level with no store selected. The percentage your menu is measured against; it also drives the suggested selling price shown in the Food Cost Margins report. Defaults to 30%.
3. Add your ingredients
Build the master list of raw materials, with pack size, cost and yield. You can add them one at a time or import the lot from Excel.
Tick Track Stock on any ingredient whose stock level you want to follow. Only those ingredients appear in Stock Movement later.
See Managing Ingredients.
4. Build your recipes
Attach ingredients to the things you sell. Do batch recipes first if you use them, so they are available to pick when you build the menu recipes on top.
- Batch Recipes — sub-recipes such as a sauce or marinade, made in advance and used inside other recipes.
- Menu Recipes — the recipe behind a sellable item, attached to a product, attribute or option value.
Once a recipe is saved you get the Total Cost per Serving for that item.
5. Check your costing is complete
With recipes built, two things fill in:
- Reporting > Menu Reports shows Food Cost Margins (store only) and Menu Engineering.
- Management > Menu > Menu Setup shows an
Ricon against every product or attribute that has a recipe — a quick way to spot the ones you have missed.
Work through the gaps until Food Cost Margins shows a valid food cost for every item. That is the point at which stock tracking will behave correctly.
Then start tracking stock
Once costing is complete and your ingredients are marked Track Stock:
- Enter your opening stock. Record what you currently hold as a stock take — see Stock Adjustment.
- Trade. Each sale deducts its recipe's ingredients automatically — see How stock moves when orders are sold for the two settings this depends on.
- Count regularly. A weekly stock take keeps the counted figure and the system figure together, and shows up waste and loss early.
- Order more. Raise purchase orders with your suppliers and mark them delivered to bring the stock back in — see Order Stock from a Supplier.