Ingredients

An ingredient is a raw material you buy and use — coffee beans, milk, buns, gin. Ingredients are the building blocks of recipes and of stock counts.

Open Ingredients

From the sidebar, open Inventory → Stock. That one list is every ingredient you have, with its unit, allergens, recipe count, on-hand count and par level side by side. There is no separate Ingredients page any more — the old link still works and brings you here.

Click any row to open that ingredient's own page, which is where everything below happens.

Add an ingredient

1. 1

   Click Add ingredient in the title bar

   A form opens to create the ingredient.

2. 2

   Name it

   Use the name you'll recognise on a recipe, like "Whole milk" or "Brioche bun".

3. 3

   Choose a unit of measure

   Pick how you count it — for example grams, kilograms, millilitres, litres, or each. This is the unit recipes and stock counts use.

4. 4

   Add a description (optional)

   A short note for your own reference.

5. 5

   Save — and you land on the new ingredient

   Creating one takes you straight into it, so you can add its cost, allergens or container without hunting for it in the list.

The ingredient form asks for a name, a unit and an optional description — that's it. See "What an ingredient costs" below for how to set a cost once it's been added.

Counting by container

If you count this ingredient by the container rather than by its unit — a bottle, a keg, a case — tick "You count this by the container" when adding it (or set it later on the detail page) and give the container a name and a size in the unit you picked (a 700ml bottle: name "bottle", size 700). Both fields are optional and go together — set both, or leave both blank.

Once set, on-hand reads in container terms everywhere it's shown — "1 bottle + 65%" — and the Count sheet asks for a container count instead of the raw unit.

The container names you already use are offered under the field, so one tap reuses "bottle" rather than typing it again. Type one you already have in a different case — "Bottle" against an existing "bottle" — and it is treated as that same container rather than becoming a near copy of it.

To do a whole shelf at once, tick the rows on Stock and use Kegs or bottles. They all have to be measured in the same unit, since a keg holds one amount.

The detail page

Click an ingredient to open it. This is the page to read while you are counting: what it costs, what is on the shelf, what it goes into, and what has moved.

Details is where you edit it:

• The name, the unit and an optional description.
• The container it's counted by (see above).
• What it costs — per keg, bottle, case, unit or litre, whichever you pick, with or without VAT in it. See "What an ingredient costs" below.
• A default area — where this ingredient lives (Cellar, Behind the bar), so stock for it lands in the right place and it appears under that heading on the count sheet. To do a lot of them at once, use Set area on Stock or Set up areas on the Count sheet instead of opening each ingredient — and that way any stock they already hold moves with them.
• Category is shown but not editable. It is worked out from the menu categories of the products whose recipes use this ingredient, so there is no second list to keep tidy. An ingredient can show more than one: limes go in cocktails and in mains, so limes show under both. An ingredient no recipe uses shows no category at all.

On hand shows what you hold in each area separately, in container terms where you have set one ("1 bottle + 65%"). They are separate counts, not different opinions about one number — use Send on Stock to move stock between them.

Used in lists every product whose recipe uses this ingredient. Click one to open its recipe.

Allergens — both what it contains and what it may contain. What you set here rolls up automatically to any dish whose recipe uses the ingredient, so you set them once. To tag several ingredients in one go, tick them on Stock and use Allergens — that one only ever adds, so nothing an ingredient already carries is lost.

What has moved

Recent movements at the bottom of the page is the history for this one ingredient, newest first: counts, wastage, transfers between areas, and sales. Download spreadsheet gives you the same rows to keep or send on.

A sale is recorded one order at a time, so a whole day of them is added up into a single Sales line rather than hundreds — the line says "across the day" so you know what you are looking at. The list covers every area together.

What an ingredient costs

Type the price off your invoice, then say what it is the price of. Next to the cost box there is a small dropdown — Priced per. Pick the keg, the bottle or the case if the ingredient has a container set; pick the unit itself (per ml, per g, per count); or pick the bigger unit of the same kind where it helps, per litre for something measured in millilitres, per kg for something measured in grams.

The field is labelled for whatever you pick: Cost per Keg, Cost per ml, Cost per l. The line under it shows what your figure works out to per unit, which is the number your margins actually use. Nobody knows the price of a millilitre, and a keg costs a fraction of a penny per one, so we do that division for you and keep the exact figure underneath.

Prices with VAT in them

Under the box is a tick box, Price includes VAT. Tick it when the figure you typed is the gross one off the invoice; leave it clear when it is the net one.

We always store your cost without VAT, because you claim purchase VAT back and it was never really your money. Leaving it in would make every dish that uses the ingredient look 20% more expensive to make than it is.

So a £166.14 keg holding 50,000ml:

• ticked — that £166.14 includes £27.69 of VAT, we store £138.45, and your cost per millilitre is 0.2769p.
• left clear — the whole £166.14 is your cost, and it is 0.3323p per millilitre.

The hint under the box spells that out as you type it, so you can check it against the invoice in front of you before you save. Purchase VAT is always 20%, so there is nothing to choose there.

Your figure and your tick are both remembered. Come back to the ingredient and the box shows the number you typed, in the same units, with the tick where you left it, not a number worked back out of the stored cost.

Most of the time the cost sets itself: record a delivery against a Supplier — open the supplier, add the ingredient to their product list, enter its Pack price (pack size and supplier code too), then match a purchase to it — and the cost updates automatically from that. See Suppliers.

Don't want to wait for your first delivery to see accurate margins? Type the cost here by hand. It's the same figure either way, so a manual entry is simply overwritten the next time a purchase updates it. Clear the field and save to remove a manually-set figure.

Archiving and deleting

From the Stock list, use a row's ⋯ menu to archive an ingredient (taking it out of use), or to restore or delete an archived one. Archived ingredients are behind the Archived filter, not on another page.

To do several at once, tick their rows and use Archive, Restore or Delete in the bar that appears. A delete asks you to confirm and names how many. An ingredient still used by a recipe is not deleted — take it off the recipe first.

Standard ingredients provided for you are read-only: they carry no tick box and can't be archived or deleted.

Prepped ingredients

Some things you use in dishes aren't bought — they're made in-house in batches: coleslaw, mashed potatoes, a curry base. Create these as prepped ingredients: tick "This is a prepped ingredient" when adding one, and say how much one batch makes (the batch yield) in the unit you picked — for example, a mash batch that makes 5 kg.

Open a prepped ingredient to build its batch recipe — the raw ingredients that go into one batch. From that recipe we work out:

• Cost per unit — the batch's ingredient cost divided by the yield, shown under the batch recipe (e.g. Batch cost £7.31 → 146.2p per kg). You never type a cost for a prepped ingredient; it updates itself when a component's price changes.
• Allergens — everything flagged on the components rolls up automatically (shown as Allergens from components). The allergen picker below that is for extra tags on the prepped item itself, e.g. something introduced by your process.

Then use the prepped ingredient in dish recipes like any other — one line of Mashed potatoes, 0.2 kg instead of listing potatoes, butter and milk on every dish.

What's next

• Recipes — link ingredients to your dishes.
• Suppliers — pack prices, and the cost that comes in with a delivery.
• Stock — the list itself, and how to count what you hold.
• Count sheet — count a whole site in one pass, in containers.