Suppliers

A supplier is someone you buy ingredients from. Recording your suppliers and what they supply lets Purchasing group your To buy list by supplier and build orders for you — and it's where each ingredient's cost is set.

Where Suppliers lives

Suppliers is now the Suppliers tab of Purchasing: open Inventory → Purchasing and pick Suppliers. It used to be its own sidebar row; the old address still works and sends you straight to the tab, so old bookmarks and links are safe.

The tab shows each supplier with their contact details, how many products they supply, and what you have spent with them.

Add a supplier

1. 1

   Click Add supplier

   A form opens to create the supplier.

2. 2

   Enter their details

   Add a name, and any contact details you have — email, phone and notes.

The detail page

Click a supplier to open it. From there you can edit their name, email, phone and notes, build their product list, see what you have spent with them over six months, their recent orders, and how their prices have moved. All suppliers at the top takes you back to the tab.

Build the product list (and set cost)

The product list is a table of the ingredients this supplier supplies. Each row carries: Ingredient, SKU (the supplier's code for it), Pack size, Pack price, the ingredient's on hand / par, and the suggested order (packs).

1. 1

   Add a product

   Use the Add a product dropdown ("Choose an ingredient…"), pick one of your existing ingredients, and click Add. A new blank row appears.

2. 2

   Fill in the row

   Enter the supplier's SKU, the Pack size (how many units come in a pack), and the Pack price (what the pack costs from this supplier). You can leave the Pack price blank: the page then uses the product's own cost, shown in grey with product cost underneath.

3. 3

   Save

   Click Save in the bar at the top of the page to store the rows.

Spend, last 6 months

The Spend chart on a supplier's page shows what you spent with them in each of the last six months, with the six-month total underneath.

Two things you may see under the chart:

• A purchase with no date cannot be put in a month, so it is not a bar. It is counted separately in a line under the chart instead of being left out.
• Nothing recorded yet appears until a delivery is received from this supplier, or a purchase is logged under their name.

Recent orders

Beside the chart, Recent orders lists the last few purchase orders raised for this supplier, each with its date, its status (Draft, Sent or Received) and how many lines it has. Cancelled orders are not shown.

Unlike the Spend chart, this list is linked to the supplier directly rather than matched on a name, so renaming a supplier does not affect it.

Price changes

Under the product list, Price changes compares what this supplier last charged you against the time before, per ingredient, over the last six months. A row only appears once you have bought the same ingredient twice at different prices. Download spreadsheet gives you the lot as a file — handy when you want to take it back to the rep.

Saving a supplier

The supplier page has one Save, in the bar at the top, and it covers both the contact details and the product table. Change a phone number, a pack price, or both — one click saves everything. The bar shows Unsaved changes until you do.

Removing a product row also waits for Save. Click the bin icon and the row disappears from the table, but it isn't deleted until you save — so if you remove one by mistake, leave the page without saving and it will still be there.

If a product line's ingredient has been archived or deleted, that line cannot be shown — there is no product left to name. A note under the table says how many lines that applies to, and saving here leaves them untouched.

Archiving a supplier

Archive supplier on the detail page takes them off your list and stops their product lines being offered. Your purchase history is untouched, the name frees up for reuse, and you land back on the Suppliers tab.

What the cost is used for

The product's cost is what margin and wastage figures use. The Pack price — or the product cost, when the Pack price is blank — is what the To buy list shows and what this page totals an order with. An order created from the To buy list only carries the Pack prices you actually typed: a line with a blank price goes on the order without one, so receiving it never overwrites the product's cost with an estimate. If a report warns that some dishes are missing a unit cost, log a purchase for the ingredients those dishes use, or receive an order with a Pack price on it.

Spend on the Suppliers tab

The tab's own Spend column totals every purchase you have recorded against the supplier name written on it, over all time. It reads your purchase log only, so a received order counts once — on the day you received it, not twice for being ordered and delivered.

A supplier with no spend yet, or spend under a name you have not added as a supplier, are both normal: like the six-month chart on the detail page, the two lists are matched by name.

What's next

• Purchasing — the To buy list, orders and the purchase log.
• Ingredients — the products a supplier supplies (and why cost lives on this side).
• Margin — where cost turns into margins.