Production: making what you sell

What the Production module is for

A recipe on a menu item takes its ingredients out of stock at the moment the dish is sold. That suits a burger, which is made when it is ordered. It does not suit a cake, which is baked in the morning and sold in the afternoon — or the next day.

For anything made ahead, three questions matter and a menu recipe answers none of them: how many are on the shelf right now, what did this batch cost to make, and what is the person who made it owed.

The Production module splits the work into the two moments it really happens in. MANUFACTURING is the making: a production run takes the recipe's ingredients out of Inventory and prices the labour. PRODUCTION is the shelf: the finished goods wait there, costed, until the POS sells them — and a sale takes a unit off that shelf, never off the recipe again.

Use it for what you make before it is ordered. A dish cooked to order should keep its ordinary menu recipe — putting it through Production would only add a step.

Switching it on

Settings → Modules → Production Module

Settings → Modules → Production Module. Turn it on and save.

Two entries appear in the sidebar under Manufacturing & Production: Manufacturing and Production. The Employees form gains an Employee Type, and Reports gains a Production Report.

The owner sees both sections at once. Everybody else sees them only after you grant Manufacturing and Production on the Roles screen — both show what your goods cost to make, which is not something a cashier's role should be handed by accident.

If the switch shows a price or a padlock instead, the module is not part of your plan: it can be added from Plans & Extras where your plan offers it.

Adding what you make, and its variants

Manufacturing → Add Item

Manufacturing → Add Item. Give it a name, a Category — the same categories Inventory uses — and the unit it is counted in, which is pieces unless you choose otherwise.

Has Variants / Sizes works exactly as it does on a menu item. Switch it on for a cake you make as 1 lb, 2 lb and 3 lb, and add a row for each. Every variant then has its own sale price, its own recipe, its own stock and its own cost: a 3 lb cake is not three 1 lb cakes.

Without variants the item itself carries the Sale Price, how many One Recipe Makes, and an optional Low-Stock Alert.

Per-Piece Labour Rate is what a per-piece contractor earns for one of THESE. Leave it blank and the contractor's own rate is used; fill it in where a wedding cake should pay more than a cupcake.

An item already on the shelf the day you start can be given an Opening Stock and what each unit cost. For variants, save first and then use Adjust → Stock Count on the Production screen.

Once an item has been produced, Has Variants can no longer be switched on or off for it. Its stock and its runs belong to what it was when they were made.

Writing the recipe

Manufacturing → Recipe

Manufacturing → Recipe on the item. Add each ingredient from Inventory with its quantity and unit, exactly as you would for a menu item.

This Recipe Makes is the part a menu recipe does not have: how many finished units one batch gives. Write the recipe the way it is cooked — the ingredients for one batch — and say it makes 12. A run of 30 then uses two and a half recipes' worth of everything.

With variants, each line has an Applies To. All Variants (shared) is the recipe every variant uses. Give a variant lines of its own and it uses only those. The table underneath shows, for each variant, which recipe it is using, how many one recipe makes, the cost per unit and the profit per unit at its sale price — worked out as you type.

The cost shown here is ingredients only, at what they cost in Inventory today. Labour is added when a run is made.

Running production

Manufacturing → Run Production

Manufacturing → Run Production, or Run on the item. Pick the item — a variant is picked by name, such as Chocolate Cake (2 lb) — the quantity and the date.

Before you press anything the screen shows what the run will take from Inventory, line by line, against what Inventory holds, and on the right the Total Cost of This Run: ingredients, labour, the cost per unit, and — where the item has a sale price — the profit per unit and the profit if all of them are sold.

Run Production does it all in one step. The ingredients are deducted from Inventory, the finished goods are added to Production at what they cost, and the run is given a batch number you can open again.

An ingredient that Inventory shows too little of is highlighted, and you are asked once whether to go on. The run is never blocked: stock that is short simply goes negative until a purchase or a stock count puts it right — the same rule the till follows.

1. 1 Choose the item and type the quantity.
2. 2 Check the ingredients it will use and the cost on the right.
3. 3 Add the contractors who worked on it, if any.
4. 4 Press Run Production.

Contractors, and several on one run

Employees → Add Employee → Employee Type

A contractor is added under Employees. Set Employee Type to Contractor, then choose how they are paid: Per Piece Rate, Hourly Wages, Daily Wages or a Monthly Salary.

On the Run Production screen, Add Contractor adds a line. Add one line for each person who worked on the run — a baker and a decorator, or three bakers sharing a batch.

A per-piece contractor's line starts with the whole run as their pieces. Where several people split the run, type how many each one made; where each is paid for all of them, leave it. An hourly or daily contractor's line asks for the hours or days this run took them. The rate is filled in from their own terms and can be changed for this run.

What each of them earns is added to the cost of the batch and to their own ledger. A contractor on a monthly salary is recorded on the run with no labour cost — they are paid their salary like any member of staff.

Employees → Ledger on a contractor has a Production Work tab: every run they worked on, their own pieces, hours or days, the rate and what it earned, with the Balance Owed — what their runs earned less everything already paid. Pay Contractor settles it, and the payment is filed in your accounts as a contractor payment rather than a salary.

The Production screen: stock, cost, price and profit

Production

Production lists every finished item — each variant on its own row — with what has been Produced, what has been Sold, and what is In Stock.

Cost / Unit is the total cost of manufacturing one unit: ingredients plus the contractors' labour, averaged over your runs. Until the first run it is an estimate from the recipe and is labelled as one.

Sale Price is what it sells for at the till, and Profit / Unit is the difference. Profit So Far is what the units already sold actually earned — each sale keeps the price it went for beside the cost it carried.

The list icon on a row opens that item's history: every run, sale, write-off and count, with the stock after each line and, on a sale, what it sold for and the profit.

Selling it from the POS

Production → Sell in POS

Production → Sell in POS. Set the Sale Price — the cost and the profit per unit are shown beside it as you type — and the POS Category it should appear under. A new menu item is created for it and it is on the till.

If you were already selling it from the menu, pick that menu item instead of creating a new one. Its sales then come off the Production stock, and its own recipe is no longer deducted.

An item with variants goes on the till as one item. The dialog lists every variant with its cost, a price and the profit; each priced variant becomes a size, and the cashier is asked which one.

To have this happen by itself, tick Sell in POS automatically on the item, or switch on "Sell finished goods in the POS automatically" under Settings → Modules for everything. The item then goes on sale the moment a run is finished. It needs a sale price: an item without one stays in Production, which is how a cake base or a dough stays off the till.

On the till, a manufactured item shows how many are left, and the size picker shows what is left of each variant. A sale is never refused because the count has run out — the stock goes negative, which tells you a run was not recorded.

Stop Selling takes it off the till without touching its stock or its history.

Wastage, stock counts and cancelling a run

Production → Adjust

Production → Adjust has two choices. Wastage writes off units that were dropped, went stale or were given away, at what they cost. Stock Count sets the shelf to what you counted; if that adds units you can say what they cost.

A run entered by mistake is undone from the run itself: Manufacturing → Production Runs → open the batch → Cancel Run. Its ingredients go back into Inventory at the cost they left at, the finished units come off the shelf, and the contractors no longer earn for it. The run stays on record, marked Cancelled, with the reason.

The Production Report, and the other reports

Reports → Production Report

Reports → Stock & Purchasing → Production Report covers a date range: production runs, units produced, ingredient cost, labour cost, units sold, sales, cost of goods sold and gross profit.

Underneath it breaks the same figures down item by item — with the cost per unit, the sale price, the profit and the margin — and contractor by contractor, with what each one earned, was paid in the period and is still owed. A third table lists the ingredients the runs used.

The Sales Report and the Order History Report gain a Manufactured Items — Cost & Profit table whenever something manufactured was sold. The Employee Report shows what each contractor made. The Inventory Report lists ingredients used in production as their own movement type, and contractor payments appear under their own name in the Transactions and Cash Flow reports.