Creating and managing ingredients

This article guides you through creating Stock Ingredients and their properties and features.

Last updated 13 Sept 2024

Jump to:

• What is a Stock Ingredient?
• Creating a new ingredient
• Bulk Cost Updates
• Notes (including account hygiene, and bulk restrictions)

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What is a Stock Ingredient within Kobas?

Any item that you keep in stock that you order from a supplier can be set up as an Ingredient. These ingredients can be sold/used in full or in parts, through the stock management system.

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Creating a New Ingredient

By accessing Operations > Ingredients, you are able to add new stock as Ingredients, as well as edit existing ingredients within your database.

On this page, you can:

• Create a New Ingredient or Edit an existing one.
• Choose a Display Name for the ingredient which is used instead of the main Name on your KDS counters.
• Delete an existing ingredient.
• Access Bulk Cost Updater and EPoS Item/Ingredient Importer. 
• Jump to Ingredient Categories. There's more information in the stock introduction.

In the New Ingredient or Edit screen, you assign a name, category, measurements, cost, and tax code to your new items. 

General Information

• Name - This is a mandatory field, and cannot duplicate a current ingredient. There's no need to add the size/supplier in the name.
• Category - This is choosing which Stock Ingredient category the ingredient will come under. This is used for grouping in reporting and usability of Stock Checks, etc.

• Restrictions (ingredient) - This will be a pop-up (see below) that allows you to dictate which venues will see this ingredient on their Stock Checks and Orders (or both). 

• Listed - Uncheck this to hide this ingredient during order creation, deliveries, and stock checks. The ingredient will still show in stock checks if it has theory usage since the last stock check. Note: Listing and Restrictions are similar, but Delisting is useful in that if you delist a supply or ingredient, and relist, the restrictions from before will remain.
• Measured in - Your Kobas account will automatically have the following measurements: milliliters (ml), grams (g), and items. This allows you to measure liquids, solids, and pre-packaged items. You can read more about this here.
• Use guide values - Guide values can be used to rationalise predictive costs in areas such as recipes. This allows you to normalise the cost of multiple supplies in cases where some supplies are anomalously different. If no guide values are entered, the "Default" supply's price will be used.

Supply

You'll then go down to the first supplier of this ingredient. You have the options to make Default, Close or Delete. Note you must have one supplier for each ingredient and one of them must be marked as default.

You can use different suppliers for each ingredient. As an example, your Vodka ingredient could be attached to all EPoS Items, Batches and Modifiers required, but have supplies as follows:

• 700ml AN Wholesaler
• 1000ml AN Wholesaler
• 500ml Tesco (also set up as a Petty Cash supplier so that you can record the petty cash too).
• 700ml Local Wholesaler

Therefore when you run out of one and move onto the next, you do not need to change the EPoS Items on the till. Furthermore, when you Stock Count, you just count all of the vodka together.

• Measure per unit - this is where you define the amount in the unit, using the measurement units selected in the "Measured in" above. So for a Coke Contour glass, this would be 330ml.
• Units per pack - this is where you define how many single units are purchased together. So for the Coke Contour glass, this would be 24 (as they come in a case of 24).
• Price - this is the price of the pack, and should be the price you pay for that pack (inclusive of tax, where you have paid tax).
• Supplier - this is where you choose the supplier from the drop-down.
• Supplier Code - you can optionally put your supplier's stock code. This is useful if you plan on using Kobas to email your orders to your suppliers.
• Tax Code - this assigns the Tax Coding for the time. Kobas can't advise on which items should have which tax level. When you select the Tax Code, an explanation will appear below. The most common are T0 (zero-rated), T1 (standard rate), T5 (temporarily reduced rate).

• Listed - Uncheck this to hide this ingredient during order creation, deliveries, and stock checks. The ingredient will still show in stock checks if it has theory usage since the last stock check.
• Restrictions (supply) - work in the same ways as the ingredient Restrictions, but apply to that supplier of the ingredient.

• Price History - once the ingredient has had its first price change, you will be able to see the price change history of the ingredient to the right-hand side. 

• Submit/Delete/Add Supply - you have to Submit changes to each supply before you can save. You can Delete the supply, and also add more.

Allergens and Recipes

• Allergens tab - this tab allows you to assign the ingredient allergen properties. This is useful as these then pull through automatically to an EPoS Item or Modifier with this ingredient in the recipe. 
• Recipes tab - this tab is useful for stock variance investigations, and other data quality processes. It will allow you to see where this ingredient is used in EPoS Items, Batches and Modifiers.

 

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Bulk Cost Updates

This tool allows you to update the prices of your ingredients, or some of your ingredients, from a set date. This is useful when you get an advance warning of updated pricing lists from your supplier.

• Go to Administration > Bulk Cost Updates
• Or Ingredients > Bulk Cost Updates

On this page, you will press Download Stock Ingredients to get a CSV (which is a basic spreadsheet) list of all of your current ingredients, their current pricing, and a few other details:

You simply add the new price into the new price column. You can’t make any other changes using this tool and editing the other columns of the spreadsheet will not allow the upload to work.

You also can’t leave the New Price column blank, so if you are only changing some, we would advise you to copy the prices from Current to New for the whole spreadsheet, and then make the changes to the New Price for those requiring changing.

• Save the spreadsheet when you are done. Return to the Pricing Administration and choose the date for the change. This can be today’s date but cannot be in the past. The prices will come into effect at 00:00 on the upload date.

The system will check the data for errors. If any formatting errors are found, the screen will look like this:

This then highlights any errors on each line, so you can fix them in the CSV file, save and re-upload. The line number will almost match the line numbers on your spreadsheet, to let you find the line with issues quickly.

• Once you upload with no errors, you can press Import Data.

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Notes

Good account hygiene and housekeeping

It's important that when ingredients are no longer used, nor are likely to be in the foreseeable future, you delete them. Over time, as your ingredient list gets much bigger, this may slow down some processes in the Kobas system.