Managing Inventory: Creating Inventory Items – Help Centre

NOTE: This guide assumes you know how to access the Manage section in SambaPOS. If unsure, please check this guide on Accessing Manage Section.

Inventory Items are things we purchase to produce food, beverages or we directly sell. We use Recipes to map Inventory Items to Products (menu items) so before creating recipes we should configure inventory items.

Settings

Name: The name of the inventory item.
Group Code: Configuring a group code is useful to group items in reporting and easier tracking.
Warehouse: This setting is useful for configuring a default warehouse for an item. You should leave this setting empty for general use. Normally we display all inventory items in a warehouse inventory even their inventory level is zero. If you store items in multiple locations you may want to hide some zero level inventory items from warehouse inventory. For example if you separated bar & kitchen warehouses you won't want to see meat inventory item listed under bar warehouse. To solve this case you can set default warehouse for meat as kitchen. When you do so meat item won't appear under bar inventory but if you transfer some meat to bar warehouse for a reason they'll appear.

Configuring Units

While creating an inventory item configuring units properly is important. There are three types of units.

Base Unit: This unit is the unit we'll use in recipes. This is the smallest piece of the item. For example it can be grams for meat (as we configure recipes in grams), bottle for beer or millilitre (ml) for wine.
Transaction Unit: This unit is the unit we track inventory in. For example base unit for meat is grams but we generally track or purchase meat in kilograms. For wine it can be CL. If a transaction unit is configured for an item reporting will be in transaction unit. Otherwise base unit will be used.
Additional Units: You can add unlimited amount of additional units. These units are useful for inventory transactions (eg. purchase, transfers). You can think them as purchasing units. For Beer it can be pack or for wine it can be barrel. The multiplier value for additional units is in base unit in default. You can change it from Unit selection combo box. Enabling check box in front of an unit will make this unit a default transaction unit.

Unit Default Cost Values

Cost values for units are Default Costs for transactions. We'll use transaction prices to calculate inventory item costs so configuring cost values or not will have no effect on resulting cost values. These are only useful to bring default prices during item transactions. We can think them as default purchase prices.