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Purchasing troubleshooting

Empty To buy lists, short deliveries, par-level basics and multi-site reordering.

Common snags when building and receiving purchase orders, with the cause and the fix for each. For the normal flow, see Purchasing.

Note

Inventory must be switched on for your account for this to appear.

My To buy list is empty

The To buy list only shows ingredients that are stock-tracked and currently at or below their par level. An empty list almost always means one of these hasn't been set up:

  1. The ingredient isn't tracked. An ingredient appears for reorder only if it is used in a recipe, or has simple tracking turned on. Link it to a recipe under Recipes, or turn on tracking under Stock levels.
  2. No par level is set. With no par level, an ingredient can never count as "low". Set one on the Stock page — tick several rows and use Minimum level to do them all at once, then press Save.
  3. Nothing is actually low. If every tracked ingredient is above its par level, there's genuinely nothing to reorder — the list says so.

I received fewer items than I ordered

Open the order from the Orders tab and type what actually arrived against each line, then click Receive. Your stock goes up by what came, and the order stays Sent with the rest still outstanding — receive it again when the balance turns up. No adjustment, no reason to type. See Receive a purchase order.

Note

This used to need a manual correction afterwards: receive the whole order, then adjust the count down by the shortfall. It doesn't any more. If you have old adjustments sitting there with a "short delivery" reason, they were the old way of doing it and are fine to leave alone.

Receiving doubled my stock

Receiving adds the quantity that arrived to your current on-hand count; it doesn't set it. If you had 10 and received 50, you now have 60.

Receiving the same delivery twice is refused — a second click, or a second tablet still showing the order as it was, will stop and tell you rather than taking it in again. If a number still looks too high, it is more likely to be two genuinely separate deliveries, or a count that was already out. A received order can't be un-received, so correct it with a manual adjustment under Adjust stock counts.

I only want to order some of what's low

Tick the rows you want on the To buy tab. A bar appears above the table saying how many are selected, with Create order from selected — the order contains exactly those lines. The Create order button above the table is the everything-in-this-group shortcut, and with nothing ticked there is no bar at all, so a stray click can never order the lot.

I can't change the quantity on an order

Order quantities are fixed once the order is created. There's no edit on the order row. If a quantity is wrong:

  • Cancel the order and create a fresh one, or
  • fix the par or on-hand value under Stock levels first, then create the order again so the suggested quantity comes out right.

I have several sites — whose stock am I ordering for?

The site you've picked. With more than one location, the Purchasing page has a Location picker at the top — the To buy list reads that location's stock counts and par levels, and Create order makes the purchase order for that location. Switch location to reorder for your other site. With a single location there's no picker and the list reads your one site, as always.

My To buy numbers ignore my areas

They don't any more. The To buy list adds up everything the site holds — the general pool plus every area — and compares that against your par levels added up the same way. Stock sitting in the cellar counts as stock you have, so it won't be re-ordered.

A par level still lives on whichever place you set it on. If you set the same ingredient a par in two places at one site, the site's par is the two added together — which is usually what you want ("keep 2 behind the bar and 4 in the cellar"), but is worth knowing if a number looks twice as big as you expected.

It's telling me to buy something I know I have

Check where that stock is recorded. If it's in an area (Cellar, Behind the bar), it counts — see above. If the item shows a much lower number than the shelf does, it has probably not been counted since it was last sold: open the Count sheet and count it in its area, which also tidies away any leftover the sales left behind.

I logged a purchase by mistake

Open the Purchase log tab, find the row, and use Remove in its … menu. Only rows tagged Logged can be removed — a row tagged Order or Receipt is the record of a real delivery that also moved your stock. Removing a logged row also puts the ingredient's unit cost back to whatever your previous purchase recorded, so a mistyped price doesn't linger in your margins.

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