Inventory FAQ

Short answers to the questions merchants ask most about Inventory. Each links to the full article.

What is a par level, and what happens when stock hits it?

A par level is the minimum amount of an ingredient you want to keep. When your on-hand count falls at or below it, the ingredient is flagged Below par on the Stock levels tab and appears on the Purchasing To buy list. See Stock levels.

Does Tillable warn me automatically when stock is low?

No. There's no email, Slack, SMS, push notification or portal badge for low stock. You see what's low only when you open the Stock levels tab and look at the status column, or Stock's Running out tab. Make checking it part of your open or close routine. See Low-stock alerts.

Why does the Boxes view show fewer products than my menu?

It should not — Boxes is your whole menu, and nothing is hidden from it. If it says "showing the first N of M", the menu is larger than one read and the view says so rather than showing a short list as if it were complete; pick a single site or a shorter window for the whole thing.

A product you cannot see at all simply did not sell in the dates you picked.

A margin tile says "cost not known" instead of a number. Why?

Because one of that dish's ingredients has no unit cost. An ingredient with no price counts as free, so the cost comes out too low and the margin too high — and a margin that reads better than it is, is worse than no margin at all. The tile names the missing input and points you at your ingredients rather than showing a figure it cannot stand behind.

For the same reason, a dish like that is left OUT of "best margins" and "worst margins" — an uncosted dish would otherwise top the best list every time — and the tile says how many it left out.

Where do I set an ingredient's cost?

From what you actually pay. An ingredient's cost updates whenever a delivery is received, a receipt is scanned or you use Log a purchase on Purchasing. Enter the price of the thing you buy (a keg, a case) and its size, and we work out the cost of one millilitre or gram, the figure every margin is built on.

A supplier's Pack price is that supplier's price for one pack, and it is optional. Leave it blank and the supplier page and the To buy list show the ingredient's own cost for the pack instead, marked product cost. Type one, and an order received at that price updates the ingredient's cost. Either way, set the pack size beside it: without it there is nothing to divide by and the pack price is used as-is, which will read as a wildly negative margin.

See Suppliers.

When I receive an order, does it add to my count or replace it?

It adds. If you had 10 on hand and receive an order of 50, you now have 60 — not 50.

You no longer have to police that yourself: receiving the same delivery twice is refused, whether it is a double-click or a second tablet still showing the order as it was. See Receive a purchase order.

What do I do if I receive fewer items than I ordered?

Open the order and type what actually arrived against each line. Your stock goes up by what came and the order stays open for the rest, so there is nothing to adjust afterwards. See Receive a purchase order.

Why is my To buy list empty?

Because nothing tracked is currently at or below par. Check that your ingredients are stock-tracked (linked to a recipe, or simple tracking on the product) and that par levels are set. See Purchasing troubleshooting.

Do purchase orders cover all my locations or just one?

One location at a time. With more than one location on your account, the Purchasing page shows a Location picker at the top: the To buy list shows what's below par at the selected location, and an order you create from it belongs to that location. With a single location there's no picker and nothing changes. See Purchasing troubleshooting.

Where has the Suppliers page gone?

It is the Suppliers tab of Purchasing now, alongside To buy, Orders and the Purchase log, so the whole buying side is one page. The old address still works and takes you straight to the tab. See Suppliers.

How do I record something I bought without raising an order?

Log a purchase, in the menu at the top of the Purchasing page. It records something you have already bought — it places no order and tells your supplier nothing. Enter the quantity and price of the thing you actually buy: if the ingredient has a container set, the form asks for kegs and cost per keg and does the sums, so your per-millilitre cost stays right. See Purchasing.

Where has the Save button on each stock row gone?

There is one Save for the whole Stock page now, at the top right, and it is always there — it wakes up as soon as you change something. Type a count or a minimum on ten rows, or a hundred, then press it once. Nothing on the page moves or pops up while you type; a line under the buttons keeps count of how many rows you have changed.

If a row cannot be saved — usually because someone else changed it while you were typing — the page tells you how many, that row keeps the number you typed and says why underneath it, and everything else still saves.

Adjust, Send and receiving a purchase order all save on their own. That Save button is only for numbers you type straight into a row.

See Stock.

Can I edit my stock and par levels in a spreadsheet?

Yes. On Stock, download the list, change the On hand and Par level numbers in Google Sheets or Excel, save it as a CSV, then use ⋯ → Import stock sheet to bring the same file back. You see every change before it is saved. It only updates ingredients you already have — it never adds new ones — and only the numbers you actually changed. Importing the same file twice does not apply a count twice. Full steps are in Stock.

Can I set a minimum level on lots of ingredients at once?

Yes. Tick the rows on Stock — or the box in the header to take everything your filters are showing — and use Minimum level. It fills the boxes in; press Save to commit them all.

They do have to be counted the same way. If you tick some kegs and some ingredients counted in millilitres, it says so rather than guessing, because one number cannot mean the same thing to both.

The same bar also has Kegs or bottles (tell several ingredients you count them by the container) and Allergens (add allergens, and may-contains, to everything you ticked — it only ever adds, so nothing already there is lost).

Why does a supplier's Spend chart show nothing for the earlier months?

Most often because the supplier was renamed. Purchases are stamped with the supplier's name at the moment they were received, so orders from before a rename stay filed under the old name and fall outside the chart. The money is not lost — the purchase log still has every row — but the chart only counts what is recorded under the name the supplier has now. The line under the chart says this on the page.

The other reasons are simpler: nothing has been received from them in those months, or the purchases were recorded with no supplier name on them at all.

See Suppliers.

Where has the "Save products" button on a supplier gone?

A supplier page now has one Save, in the bar at the top, covering both the contact details and the product table. Edit a phone number, a pack price, or both, then save once. The bar reads Unsaved changes until you do.

Deleting a product row waits for that Save too: the row vanishes from the table straight away, but nothing is removed until you save. If you bin a row by mistake, leave the page without saving and it will still be there.

See Suppliers.

Where has Stock analytics gone?

It is now Margin, in the sidebar. Everything that was on it is there — dish margins, wastage, menu engineering, price changes and the counted-versus-expected gap (now called Stock checks) — plus the real margin figures that used to sit at the top of Usage. The old /inventory/analytics link still works and brings you to Margin.

See Margin.

Why does a margin tile sometimes show pounds but no percentage?

Because a margin percentage is only honest when most of your takings has a recipe behind it. The figure is worked out over the sales it can see — items with a recipe — so if only a fifth of your takings is costed, the percentage is the margin of that fifth and not of the business.

When less than half your takings is costed, the tile shows the pounds, drops the percentage, and says what share it could see. Adding recipes to what you sell most is what fills it in.

The same idea, one step further: if a dish has an ingredient with no unit cost, its cost reads low and its margin reads high — so that dish is left out of "best margins" and "worst margins" lists rather than topping them, and the tile says how many it left out.

The margin on Usage and the margin on the Margin page are different numbers. Why?

They are two different questions and the Margin page keeps them apart on purpose.

The top of Margin is what you actually made: your real sales over the period, minus what those sales used at current ingredient costs. The Usage page header reads the same calculation.

"Menu margin, per dish" lower down is what each dish would make at menu price — its base price minus today's recipe cost, for every dish on the menu, sold or not. Useful for pricing, but it is not earnings.

The Dashboard tiles and the Boxes view work over the same sales and cost each dish the same way as the top of the Spreadsheet: sizes, add-ons, units converted and prepped ingredients at their prep cost. A drink poured by measure can still differ, because the Spreadsheet follows the measure poured. Every one of these margins has VAT still in it, which is why each is labelled Margin incl. VAT; tap the (i) beside one to see exactly what it holds. For what you made with VAT and refunds taken off, use Profit after costs on Reports → Daily sales.

Why does my margin look far too low, or negative?

If it started before 21 August 2026, this was our bug, not something you did.

An order raised from the To buy list used to copy the supplier's pack price onto the ingredient as the price of a single unit — £29.50 for a 700ml bottle became £29.50 per millilitre, and every dish using it showed a catastrophic loss. Nobody typed anything wrong; raising the order was enough. That conversion is fixed: a pack price is now divided by the pack size before it becomes a unit cost.

Costs already recorded that way did not correct themselves, because the real price was never stored anywhere to correct them from. To fix one:

1. 1

   Check the pack size on the supplier's product list

   A price is only divisible if we know what it is a price for. No pack size means nothing to divide by, and the cost is still passed through as-is.

2. 2

   Record the next delivery as normal

   Receiving writes the corrected cost, so the ingredient fixes itself the next time you buy it. This is the fix for almost everyone: no numbers to work out and nothing to type.

3. 3

   Or type the price yourself, if the ingredient has a container

   Give the ingredient a container — a keg, a bottle, a case — and its cost box on Ingredients becomes Cost per keg. Type what a keg costs, £95, and we do the division. That is the number you actually know.

The totals on Usage went up. Did my costs rise?

No. The page was showing you less than you had used, and that is fixed.

Usage works out consumption for every ingredient in every week or month of the window, which for a large ingredient list is a lot of lines. Above roughly 125 ingredients we were only ever reading the first part of that answer and adding it up as though it were all of it — with no warning anywhere, because nothing told us the rest had been left behind. The lines that went missing were the oldest weeks and the cheapest ingredients first.

So if your Usage figures have risen, nothing about your buying changed. The page is now reading every line before it totals anything, and if a window is ever too large to total exactly it says so on the page rather than quietly showing you a short number.

Nothing else moved: the same weeks, the same recipes, the same unit costs.

An ingredient's cost has a red "check cost" badge. What does that mean?

It means that ingredient's unit cost is far higher than any real price for that unit — almost always a pack, bottle or keg price sitting in a box that expects the price of a single millilitre, gram or unit. £29.50 is a fair price for a bottle of gin and an impossible one for a millilitre of it.

The badge is on the ingredient itself, so you can see exactly which one to fix rather than being told the page as a whole looks wrong. Fix it the same way as "Why does my margin look far too low, or negative?" above — set a container, or let the next delivery write the cost.

Countable units — each, portion, bottle-as-an-item — are never flagged: one of those can legitimately cost whatever it costs, so there is nothing to compare against.

Can I see when one ingredient actually gets used?

Yes. On Usage, click any ingredient. Its page covers the last 28 days and shows the busiest days of the week, the hours of the day it goes, every product it goes into with each one's share, and what is on the shelf right now with how long that lasts at the current rate.

Can I split the count sheet up by where things live?

Yes. On the Count sheet, tap Set up areas, name the places you count (Cellar, Behind the bar, Store room) and move each item into one. The sheet then groups itself to match your walk instead of listing everything A to Z. Whatever stock an item already had moves with it, so your numbers don't change.

Why does the same drink appear twice on the count sheet?

Because some of it is recorded in its area and some of it isn't — a delivery left in the store room, say. The second line is marked "Unassigned stock". They are two real places, so count both.

An item shows less than the shelf does. Why?

Sales come off the general pool, not off the area. So between counts an item you've put in an area can drift, and the general pool can even go below zero. Nothing to fix by hand: the next time you count that item in its area, the leftover is tidied away in the same save.

What's next

• Stock levels · Purchasing · Suppliers