Everything you buy. Invoices feed this list, recipes draw from it, and food cost is the result.
The list
Name, supplier, category, price, on hand, tax.
Filter by category or supplier, or search. Five hundred products is normal for a full kitchen. See Categories.
Two names for one thing
The product — the item as a supplier sells it. 1 LITRE/SEALTEST 35% WHIP CREAM. 12/BUNCH/CORIANDER. That name is what the supplier prints, and keeping it is what makes the next invoice line match.
The canonical product — what it is. Cream - 35%. Coriander. One clean name for the whole group, whichever supplier it comes from.
Recipes point at the canonical product, not at a supplier's description. Change supplier, and no recipe breaks. See Canonical products.
Adding one
Most products are born on an invoice: a line NexReps has never seen, and you choose Create a product. You can also Add Ingredient here for something you have never bought.
Either way, the form asks for its Canonical product, right under the name. Start typing — tomato — and the existing ones appear. Pick the one it is. Only if none fits, choose None of these: create a new canonical.
That one choice is what stops the catalogue from splitting into two basmati rices.
Kept in — the unit your recipes use: grams for oregano, pieces for eggs, millilitres for cream. Not the unit you buy in.
Opening one
Pricing & Package — how it arrives at this venue: inner pack, packs per case, the case price. The price per unit is computed from them, never typed. See Reception format.
Recipe — trim loss, and every recipe using this product, with quantity. That list is the blast radius: change the price and those recipes move. See Trim loss.
Recipe Units — the units recipes can use for it. See Units and conversions.
Inventory — on hand, and its value.
Log waste — something spoiled, expired, or hit the floor. See Waste.
Each venue runs its own
The catalogue is shared by the group. The price, the pack format, the supplier and the tax are each venue's own. A change at one venue never touches another.
Empty fields
— everywhere means the product exists but has never been on a validated invoice at this venue. No price has arrived yet.
A product with no price counts as zero. Not as an error, not as a warning — as zero.
Which means a recipe containing it shows a cost that is too low. A dish costed at $4.10 that should be $7.80 will price itself and sell itself.
The recipe list flags this. A card carrying an Incomplete badge has at least one line with no price, or a line whose unit does not convert — see Recipes.
Most of the time the fix is an invoice. Price arrives, badge goes, cost is true.
Next
Canonical products — one product, every supplier.