On this document we'll create an example about Inventory and Cost tracking. First of all I want to talk about key points of SambaPOS inventory system.

• Inventory item is different than product. We map products to inventory items with recipes. Even there is one to one relationship with a product and inventory item (such as coke, fanta) we should create inventory item and the recipe. You can create individual inventory items for each product or track all inventory on a single “bottle drinks” inventory card.
• There is no requirement to track invetory of all products. You can start with most important products and create recipes for small items as you need.
• When we purchase new inventory we register them with Transaction Documents.
• The numbers defined on recipes are not exact numbers. For example you said there is 10 gr. tomato in hamburger and 40 gr. tomato in salad. If you sell 100 hamburger and 100 salad SambaPOS will automatically decrease inventory by 5kg of tomato. In real life can it be exactly 5kg? At the end of day you weighed tomato you saw 6kg tomato used. Maybe some of them wasted or chef was in a generous mood. Whatever the reason of this difference is we have to distribute that difference to both pizza and salad cost. The numbers we defined in recipes are meaningful now. The difference is equal to the cost of 1kg. tomato. We should add %20 of it to hamburger cost and %80 of it to salad cost. That means recipe amounts defines the ratios of the cost difference we need to distribute. That have no effect on products that have no tomato in it.

Let's see a simple example. We'll start by creating inventory items.

We add new inventory items from Management > Products > Inventory Items list. I'm creating a recipe for Hamburger product so I'll create some inventory items which we'll need. I have to pay attention to Unit definition. Base unit is the smallest unit of the item. Transaction unit is the unit we generally use. For example the smallest unit of the tomato is GR and we purchase tomato with KG transaction unit. If I'll use only base unit I have to leave transaction unit as zero. After saving it I'll create two more inventory items named “Bread” and “Ketchup”.

While creating Bread card I configured the base unit as Piece and there is 10 breads in one pack.

These are the required inventory items for producing Hamburger. Now we'll create a recipe from Products > Recipes > Add Recipe.

I named the recipe as Hamburger. When I write hamburger in “Product” editor and press Tab key SambaPOS will fetch all available portions and fill the portion part if there is only one portion configured for that product. Recipes are portion based. If you have more portion options for hamburger you have to configure recipes for all portions.

It is possible to add inventory items such as salt, pepper or similar small stuff but instead of tracking inventory for these items you can use “Fixed Cost” setting. SambaPOS will add this amount to the cost of all sold portions.

That's all we need to do for tracking inventory.

Next we'll start a new work period and create a new Transaction Document. We use transaction documents for increasing inventory and defining the cost of inventory items. We can only create transaction documents in a work period.