How Stock & Recipes works

Add-on

Stock & Recipes is an add-on. If Inventory isn't in your sidebar, it isn't on your plan — see What's included, and what's an add-on.

What this is for

Knowing what you're holding, what it cost, and what it turned into.

Without it you find out you're out of salmon when a table orders it. With it, stock comes down as you sell, and you get told before you run out.

The chain

Five things, and they connect in one direction:

1. 01SuppliersWho you buy from
2. 02Purchase ordersWhat you ordered
3. 03Inventory itemsWhat you actually hold
4. 04RecipesHow much of it each dish uses
5. 05Menu itemsWhat you sell

The chain only pays off once recipes are in place — that is the link that turns a dish sold into stock used.

Sell a dish, and its recipe tells Restodesk what to take out of stock. That's the whole mechanism.

The pieces

Thing	What it is
Inventory item	An ingredient you hold — salmon fillet, olive oil, a bottle of Rioja.
Unit	How you measure it — kg, litre, each, bottle.
Item category	How you group ingredients — Meat, Dairy, Dry Goods, Beverages.
Supplier	Who you buy from.
Purchase order	What you ordered, and what actually arrived.
Stock	How much you currently hold of each item.
Movement	Every change to that number, and why.
Recipe	What one menu item consumes.
Batch recipe	Something you make in bulk and then serve from.

What "it works" looks like

Once it's running:

• A dish sold takes its ingredients out of stock automatically.
• Items below their threshold appear on a low-stock list, and can email you a daily summary.
• A purchase order received puts stock back in.
• Waste is recorded with a reason, so it's visible rather than absorbed.
• Cost of goods, usage against expected usage, and gross margin per dish become real numbers.

What it costs you

Be honest about this before you start, because a half-maintained inventory is worse than none — it produces numbers people trust and shouldn't.

It needs:

• Recipes for the dishes you care about. Not necessarily all of them.
• Deliveries recorded when they arrive.
• Waste recorded as it happens.
• Periodic counts to correct the drift that always occurs.

The first setup is a few days of work. The upkeep is minutes a day, if it's a habit.

Where to start

Don't try to do everything at once. In this order:

1. Units — a handful. kg, g, litre, ml, each.
2. Item categories — five or six.
3. Suppliers — the ones you actually buy from.
4. Inventory items — start with your expensive and fast-moving lines.
5. Opening stock — count what you have and enter it.
6. Recipes for your top twenty sellers. These carry most of your food cost.
7. Add the rest over the following weeks.

Twenty dishes covering most of your volume gives you most of the value. Chasing the long tail on day one is how the project stalls.

A warning worth reading

Partial inventory lies. If half your dishes have recipes, your cost-of-goods report is missing half your food cost — but it prints a number anyway, and it looks authoritative.

Either commit to a defined scope and know its boundaries — "all food, no drinks" is a perfectly good scope — or don't rely on the totals.

The rest of this section

• Items, categories and units
• Suppliers and purchase orders
• Recipes and batch recipes
• Stock counts and adjustments
• Inventory reports

Good to know

• Stock is per branch. Two locations hold their own, and can transfer between each other.
• Inventory permissions are separate from everything else, so a chef can manage stock without reaching your sales figures. See What each role can do.
• Waste refunds on an order feed into this too — see Refunds and cancellations.

Next

Items, categories and units