As much as I love Samba despite the many hours spent to figure out issues in customizing it for my Restaurant there is one function of which I have been very enthusiastic in the very beginning but which I have failed to implement due to ease of use/practicability aspects - Inventory Management.
Maybe it works for simpler Restaurant setups but we have many recipes for our international cuisine themed establishment in a Philippine town. This includes various Cocktails, Milk Shakes, Coffees, Frappes and other drinks plus Pizza’s, Pasta and food of many categories including weekly specials. Thus we have up to 200 recipes with about 500 ingredients. I actually recorded most of it but finally gave up due to the inherent complexity of how the inventory management is implemented. I only use it to control the consumption of beer. And I use https://www.cookkeepbook.com/ to capture all recipes and do the costing of all items. This works great because this platform is easy to use and understands measurement units - you can even add your own conversions. But of course Inventory Management per se is done manually.
And these are the major inhibitors:
- Semantic: A cook measures in cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc. but rarely in milliliter or grams and it makes no practical sense to change this. Thus one captures recipes in Samba which have no meaning for the cook because everything needs to be converted manually into milliliter and grams or whatever one chooses as standard unit. On top of that cooks tend to meausure ingredients like flour in volumetric units such as cups. Thus you have to google with every ingredient to ask the weight e.g. of a cup of flour. And if there is a tablespoon of flour in another recipe you will do this again. In 'https://www.cookkeepbook.com/ you would do this once and all other measures are derived from it.
- Inventory Items: For each and every possible unit of purchase you have to provide the conversion to your base unit. Thus e.g. when I record a purchase and the particular unit for a Syrup is not yet recorded I have to stop the recording of the purchase and first add this new unit. In https://www.cookkeepbook.com/ the ingredient is not linked to units but to purchases and the system itself understands the measurement units. What I can do there is that I can associate my own converters to an ingredient such as the weight of a US or metric standard cup of flour.
- Costing/pricing: There is not sufficient support in Samba for this. Our pricing was originally done by the first cook and I doubted his method. After recording all recipes in https://www.cookkeepbook.com/ and understanding the costing I changed more or less all prices - some became lower and some higher.
- Purchases: You can’t specify date and time of the purchase - the recorded date/time is the time of recording the transaction. It is not realistic to assume that the date/time of recording coincides with the date/time of purchase. Thus the end of day records will always be out of synch unless you do immediate recording, I have to use Accounting Software anyhow because there are other costs not covered by Samba and so I don’t do this double effort other than for beer. At least the accounting software gives me a way to understand the gross COGS for food and drinks.
Well I would love to get an easy to use inventory management with Samba. Maybe there is hope :-).