Inventory & purchasing

What inventory does

Inventory sits under one screen with a row of tabs — Stock, Recipes, Suppliers, Purchasing, Counts, and Waste. Between them they do three things:

• Track stock — how much of each ingredient you have on hand, in your own units.
• Deduct as you sell — link a dish to its ingredients once, and every paid order takes them off stock for you.
• Tell you what to reorder — anything below its low-stock level is flagged, and you can raise a purchase order to top it back up.

Add your stock items

Start on the Stock tab and add every ingredient you want to keep an eye on — not finished dishes, but the things they’re made from: chicken, rice, oil, cups, and so on.

1. Tap Add item and give it a name (with a Thai name too, if you like).
2. Pick the unit you count it in — grams, kilograms, millilitres, litres, or pieces.
3. Set the cost per unit so waste and purchase values are priced correctly.
4. Set a low-stock level — the point at which you’d want to reorder. Leave it at zero if you’d rather not be warned for that item.

To keep a long list tidy, group items into categories (Meat, Dry goods, Packaging…) using Manage categories, then filter the list by tapping a category chip. New stock is added by receiving a purchase order or adjusting an item — not typed in as a running total — so the number always traces back to something real.

Recipes — link dishes to ingredients

A recipe tells FoodFlow which ingredients a menu dish uses, and how much of each. Set it once and the maths takes care of itself every time that dish sells.

1. Open the Recipes tab — every menu item is listed with its ingredient count.
2. Tap a dish, choose an ingredient, and enter the quantity one serving uses (say 180 g of rice).
3. Add as many ingredients as the dish needs; remove any that don’t belong.

From then on, when that dish is sold and the order is paid, the right amount of each ingredient comes off stock automatically. Sell two of the dish and it deducts twice the recipe. Dishes without a recipe simply don’t move stock — handy for drinks or items you don’t track.

Suppliers & purchase orders

Record who you buy from, then raise purchase orders to bring stock in. Receiving a PO is what actually adds quantity back to your shelves.

1. On the Suppliers tab, add each supplier with their contact details and any payment terms.
2. On the Purchasing tab, tap New PO, choose a supplier, and add lines — each an item, a quantity, and a unit cost. FoodFlow totals it for you.
3. Mark the PO sent when you’ve placed the order with the supplier.
4. When the delivery arrives, tap Receive and enter what actually turned up. Stock goes up by those amounts and each item’s cost is refreshed to what you just paid.

Log waste

Things get dropped, spoiled, or burnt. Logging waste takes those ingredients off stock so your counts stay honest — and gives you a record of what it cost.

1. On the Waste tab, pick the item and the amount that was lost.
2. Choose a reason — expired, spoiled, damaged, overcooked, dropped, contaminated, or other — and add a note if it helps.
3. Save. The quantity comes off stock and the loss is valued at that item’s current cost.

If a physical count ever disagrees with the system, the Counts tab lets you count everything and reconcile the numbers in one go, so the app matches your shelves again.

Low-stock alerts

Any item that drops below the low-stock level you set is flagged right in the Stock list, and a counter at the top of the page shows how many items need attention. It’s your reorder shortlist — glance at it, then raise a purchase order for whatever’s running thin.