Solution for creating the Prep product in V5

Continuing the discussion from Pre prepped products:

Do we have the solution for creating the Prep product in V5 yet?

and in a way that the cost analysis won’t look completely whacked if possible?

@fickle_123 I’ve changed your category to V5 Question - V5 Issue should be used if you find a bug or similar in the product, which is not the case here.

My bad, I selected “reply as linked topic” on the previous thread and it automatically chose V5-issue category for me (which I skim read it and thought it was V5 question ) :sweat_smile:

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Yes, as far as Consumption and Cost, we can do this with Inventory Products. These are different than Inventory Items. You define a Product and create a Recipe for it using Inventory Items.

The Inventory Product is outlined in Orange, and it’s Recipe is outlined in Blue. The Inventory Items that make up the Product Recipe are outlined in Green


Now that you have a Tortilla Product and Recipe defined, you can define the Recipe for your Wrap. The Recipe for the Wrap contains, for example:

  • 1 Tortilla (Inventory Product)
  • 6 ounces of Chicken (Inventory Item)

When you sell the Wrap, your consumption and Cost will “drill-down” through the Recipes, so for example, you will consume (and cost follows this too):

1 Gram of Flour White
0.2 Ounces of Butter Salted
6 Ounces of Chicken

What you will notice is that there is no Consumption of the Tortilla because it is an Inventory Product, not an Inventory Item. However, Inventory Item “ingredients” that are used in the Tortilla Recipe (Flour, Butter) are properly Consumed. This also reflects in the Cost/Profit of the Sale 


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Thanks @QMckay Following your guide, I think i could grasp the concept a lot better now :smiley:

Here’s my quick testing inventory setup (portion used are arbitary so don’t be afraid to visit my restaurant if we happen to cross path :joy: :yum:)

Now i’m left with two questions at the moment,

  1. So I normally made around 10kg stir fry sauce (sub ingredient in sambapos) pre-maded , but cannot track that in sambaPOS yet can I ? (i.e. create a prep/premade button for stir fry sauce stock and when I select it, it automatically increases the stock of stir fry sauce for 10g. Whilst at the same time decreasing the stock of base items like oyster sauce, soy sauce, etc

  2. So we cannot use inventory’s item addition units for specifying recipe portion right? See image below

If for example I have 50 products using the same portion of chicken and I have to update chicken portion later, it’d be quite convenient to just change my 'Dinner serve" additional unit on inventory item to reflect that. I think your Inventory Control for Menu Items via Order Tags and Portion Mapping:
have the solution for having a single entry point to update all portion but my restaurant setup don’t really use order tag :confused:

I’m guessing this isn’t yet implemented because if the user were to delete additional units that are used in recipe then the recipe becomes a whack :open_mouth: ?

The dropdown for a Recipe using an Inventory Item always uses the BASE Unit. You cannot use the Transaction Unit nor Additional Units of Inventory Items in a Recipe. But you can use different Units in Inventory Products.

You should though. That is where the power lies. My setup took me at least a week of 8 hours a day, just to get everything mapped out between Menu Items and Inventory. It is tedious and looks confusing. I still get lost sometimes, but then I can see fairly quickly why I did it this way, and why it works so well.

So let me take this one step further, and show you how I go about building a Menu Item.

I use Order Tag mappings and Portions frequently. There are 2 methods I use depending on the “ingredient”. In the case of a Wrap, it looks like this:

I know, it looks crazy right? It might be a bit difficult to understand at first, but you will eventually get the hang of it. Let me try to explain


This is a “sandwich shop”. We sell fixed Menu Items like Burger, Hot Dog, Club Wrap, Donair Wrap, Philly Cheese Chicken, etc. But everything is made-to-order per customer desire, so it is really a “build-your-own” whatever.

While most people order things as-is, we also often get people wanting something like a Philly Chicken, but instead of having it on the “default” a Philly Bun, they want it in a Wrap instead, or they want it on a Burger Bun, or they want NO Bun at all.

Given that the “bread” is the defining quantifier for everything else that goes on it (amount of cheese, amount of chicken, amount of veggies, condiments, etc, means that I use Portions for every “sandwich” we sell. This lets me define Recipes based on the Portion, and I control the amount of “ingredients” based on the BREAD choice. That is why my Club Wrap, for example, has Portions for each Bread choice.

I have some Rules that monitor the Portion Changed event and automatically swap the Breads Order Tag according to the Portion, because it is the basis for everything else.

Besides the swapping of the Breads Order Tag, the Portions are each mapped to their own Recipe.

Notice that the BREADS Inventory Product Recipe has every Bread choice in it, and those choices are mapped to Order Tags. This means that no matter which Bread I choose, only one of the Breads are consumed. That is why in the Chicken Club Recipe, I have BREADS as an ingredient, and it links to the BREADS Inventory Product, which links to the BREADS Recipe. One Recipe for BREADS controls the Bread consumption.


So that is one way to set this up, but suffice it to say: BREADS is a special thing. For most everything else, it looks like this:

So let’s look at MEATS. And we will use MEATBALLS as an example, because this is a pre-prepped Inventory Product that consumes other Inventory Items. And we will compare consumption of a Meatball as it pertains to a Slider and a Wrap.

Umm
 wow, it got worse didn’t it? Right, well, let’s look at what we ordered (bottom of picture)

Chicken Club Wrap.Slider
Chicken Club Wrap.Wrap

Notice neither has Chicken. They both have Meatballs. And only one is made in a Wrap, while the other is made on a Slider Bun. So this is a bit of an extreme example, because if someone wanted a Slider, why not just order a Slider, right? Right. I could have illustrated an even sillier example by making neither on a Wrap by making an order for Club.Slider and Club.Philly. That would make neither “Chicken Club Wrap” have Chicken nor Wrap, completely defeating the purpose of the name of the “Chicken Club Wrap” Menu Item. But it shows the power of the system.

Before we continue, it will help to see the CHEESES Product and Recipes 


And let’s see the Order one more time:

##Consumption

Chicken Club Wrap.Slider consumes:

  • 1 Slider Bun
  • 1 Meatball
  • 0.25 Slice of Swiss

Chicken Club Wrap.Wrap consumes:

  • 1 Flour Tortilla
  • 3 Meatballs
  • 1.5 Slice of Cheddar

So with our 2 Orders, we consume:

  • BREADS:
  • 1 Slider Bun
  • 1 Gr Flour [Tortilla Recipe]
  • 0.2 Oz Butter [Tortilla Recipe]
  • MEATS:
  • 8 Oz Ground Beef (2 Oz Ground Beef [Meatball Recipe] x 4)
  • 40 mL Oatmeal (10 mL Oatmeal [Meatball Recipe] x 4)
  • 0.08 Oz Egg (0.02 Oz Egg [Meatball Recipe] x 4)
  • CHEESES
  • 0.25 Slice Swiss
  • 1.5 Slice Cheddar
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Let’s take a quick look at something like Chili. (yes, chili has more than just Ground Beef in it, but
 )

So you think to yourself: “I don’t make chili an Ounce at a time - I make a whole Pot of it, and use x Ounces of that Pot when I put chili on an Order. So to make it easy on myself, I will make a Recipe for an entire Pot.”

That’s great, but then you realize you need to compute the FRACTION of that Pot that you use on each Menu Item. That becomes tedious and difficult because you have 20 Menu Items that could use chili and they all require different amounts of chili.

Instead, don’t bother with the Pot Recipe. Make an Ounce Recipe (or mL or whatever). Just be sure that Recipe is for the SMALLEST Unit of measure that could go on ANY Item. This is the reason the Meatball Recipe from the previous example looks a bit weird:

0.02 of an Egg? What? Of course, I make a batch of meatballs from 10 Pounds of Ground Beef, and that batch requires 4 Eggs. So a single Meatball requires a small portion of 1 Egg. But now I don’t need to make a FRACTION of 10 Pounds of Meatballs for everything that a Meatball goes in. I just use MEATBALL as the Unit of Measure.

In the same way, you should use Ounce for Chili, and forget the POT Recipe altogether. That is the way I do it anyway. But you can do this as well


Heck I could do that with Meatballs as well (I didn’t realize we could do the above until just now), and it actually simplifies the math quite a bit, because you can create “batches” or “pots” of things, and then sub-divide them by ounce or “ball” or “piece” or whatever


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thanks @Qmckay for the putting so much time to write a guide for me XD. its 4am today and i have this whole monday to familise myself with your guide on setting up inventory( and hopefully accounting too ).

I need some sleep now though or I might end up sleeping through my hard earned monday holiday :stuck_out_tongue:

On a side note, i’m assuming you processed some but not all ground beef,oatmeal,egg into meat balls stocks beforehand right? so how do you personally keep track of how much meatballs you have left i stock or need to be re-pre maded? And out of all the eggs reported in sambaPOS stock prediction, how many eggs are actually still in the physical pack,(assuming eggs should already mixed wit the meatball recipe) ?

or are these tasks better off done via physical observation?

I was going to write a full Tutorial on this quite some time ago. But it is very involved and I shelved it. I guess now you have an idea on how it can work for you, but a very details Tutorial would take quite a while to put together.

We have no facility to track this yet. Basically what we have is sub-recipes for Inventory Products. Those Recipes consume the raw material (Inventory Items).

What we don’t yet have is a method to “order Inventory Products from our self”. The system is extremely powerful and flexible, but there is that 1 missing piece at this time.

It would be nice if when we made a batch of Meatballs or Chili, that we could have a way to track the Stock Quantity of that Inventory Product. So if I take 10 Pounds of ground beef and make 80 Meatballs, it would be nice to have a way for us to enter into Stock “80 Meatballs”. And that “purchase” of 80 Meatballs consumes the Ground Beef, but also adds to the “Meatball Stock Quantity”. But alas, we cannot do this, yet.

So to answer your question: yes, I must visually inspect my Ground Beef, Eggs, etc. to decide if I need to order more, because no we do not really have a “Solution for creating the Prep product in V5”.

I mean, I can look at my Ground Beef Consumption to see if we are getting low on Ground Beef
 but in reality, we might not have ANY Ground Beef in Stock since I just finished making 10 Pounds of Meatballs.

What this entire setup still does for us though is it tracks Cost/Profit Rate of our Menu Items, very effectively.

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Alright, Lets do this and see if I can finish it by next Sunday. My setup is that I duplicate the same product for each and every different meat it uses. So I’d probably take a while to revamp the whole setup :slight_smile:. like so,


If I finish the inventory setup and never touch it again, then I think I’ll be lost on what I did when came back to have a look 3 months later :sweat_smile:. (but then again, I’d probably do a lot of adjustments the first few months which will hopefully make me retain how it works in long term memory)

That sounds like it is a candidate for using the Meat as the Portion, much in the same way I use Bread for the Portion.

This is the Action and Rule that handles Tagging the Order with the proper Bread when the Portion changes 


[='[:PortionName]'=='Wrap' ? 'Flour Tortilla' : ('[:PortionName]'=='NO BREAD' ? 'NO BUN / TORTILLA' : ('[:PortionName]' == 'Bowl Bun' ? '[:PortionName]' : '[:PortionName]' + ' Bun'))]

And this is the full setup for the Bread Order Tags 


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i am lost in configuration of my kitchen inventory and i kindly need your assistance. I have to post it here because i want the guys to know that i have read all these tutorials and still not grasping the concept fully.However i am good to go with bar inventory,warehouse purchase etc.

My concern is with kitchen products, I have one menu item called beef curry its prepared by (2 pounds well-trimmed boneless beef stew meat, cut into 1-inch pieces
30ml vegetable oil
2 large onions sliced
6 whole cloves
etc

its served with a portion of Hot cooked rice
(1 kg of rice can give 10 portions to be served with beef curry).

can someone kindly explain to me how i am supposed to achieve this on my inventory. Beef curry is prepared in big portion and its it served per plate as per the customer orders,Someone to shed some insights on how i can achieve this

You should have a read of the following Topic as it explains the same scenario as above in greater detail:

You should probably set it up something like the following, which is explained above as Meatballs or Chili:

  • create Inventory Items for Beef Stew Meat, Oil, Onion, Garlic, Rice, etc. Ensure the Base Unit for these Items are the smallest unit of measure for anything that you will prepare (ie. Ounce, mL, Gram, Clove, etc.)

  • create an Inventory Product that will handle the Beef Recipe. Name Product something like “Curry Beef”.

  • add 2 Portions to the Inventory Product. One will be something like “Batch” and the other will be “Serving” (or similar) - the idea being that the “Serving” Portion will represent a small Unit of measure like an Ounce or Cup.

  • create a Recipe for the “Curry Beef.Batch” Inventory Product which contains the Ingredients selected from Inventory Items (ie. Meat, Oil, Onions, etc.)

  • create a Recipe for the “Curry Beef.Serving” Inventory Product which contains the Ingredients selected from the “Curry.Beef.Batch” Inventory Product (ie. 1/10 of a Batch such as 0.10 Batch)

  • create a Recipe for your “Beef Curry” Menu Item Product using the “Curry Beef.Serving” Inventory Product and the Rice Inventory Item.

QMCkay :slight_smile: indeed thank you for your kind response i now understand but i will need to to do this with more products and i will let know in-case i hit a snag.
create Inventory Items for Beef Stew Meat, Oil, Onion, Garlic, Rice, etc. Ensure the Base Unit for these Items are the smallest unit of measure for anything that you will prepare (ie. Ounce, mL, Gram, Clove, etc.)

have done the same for all other inventory item

recipies

[quote=“QMcKay, post:13, topic:10375”]
create a Recipe for your “Beef Curry” Menu Item Product using the “Curry Beef.Serving” Inventory Product and the Rice Inventory Item.
[/quote]

Kindly let me know if this is how it should be done

Looks good!

As long as you have the unit measurements correct for your Recipes, that should work very well for you.

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Does 0.1 Batch amount for Curry Beef is correct? It works like a multiplier for product recipe and makes 0.1 grams of oil etc


Thanks Qmckay and emre let me try this am sure i will come back again after previewing my stock report.in the meantime am grateful for the whole samba team for this great and awesome product

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Hi all ,
Qmckay and Emre thankyou for your guidance ,Kindly check my progress and let me know if i am on the right footage.I have tried to follow the tutorials and also to conceptualize the issue.My only problem is linking the inventory recipe serving of beef mignon and the product item. I need to know whether thats is how is supposed to be done .
I also need to know whether the way i have linked my Menu product and the inventory product is the collect way.please check the last step.

As for the report i need to understand fully so i may require to study and evaluate

i started with linking my warehouse with the right department as shown

Then i created the required inventory products

Created recipe for batch production

Created the recipe for serving production

Created recipe for menu item beef mignon and attached it to beef mignon serving product

Buying inventory items for kitchen warehouse

selling 1000 units of beef mignon

evaluating the inventory report

Great step by step Qmckay thanks a lot

What we don’t yet have is a method to “order Inventory Products from our self”. The system is extremely powerful and flexible, but there is that 1 missing piece at this time. still no solutions for this?? :slightly_frowning_face:
it will be great if this can be done.