Recipe Inventory Management

ROBOTILL allows you to set up 'Recipes', 'Restaurant Menu Items' and various types of cocktails and drinks to keep detailed track of your ingredients used. Not only will it keep track of how much of each ingredient you have left, but the cost of your menu items will automatically be calculated from the ingredients they use.

In order to do this, you will need to set up various products. A product can be an ingredient (example tomatoes, eggs, burger patties) or the actual item you will be selling (example: hamburger or cocktail). To add a product see the product setup instructions.

Create an 'Ingredients' Category

You can first create a category called Ingredients (or something similar) and mark it as 'Hidden from POS Apps'.

The reason why you want to create a separate category for these items and to hide it from the POS applications is that you don't want the waiters and cashiers to look through various ingredients (that are not being sold) to try and find an item that is on the menu.

Set up the ingredients you will use

For this example we will use an eggs as our first ingredient. We first create an 'Egg' product.

You create the ingredient like any other product but select the Ingredient category you created. You can make the selling price zero as it will not be sold. You can also make the unit cost zero for now - ROBOTILL will calculate it for us in the next step.

You can add more ingredients like 'slice of cheese', 'burger patty', etc.

Set up how you receive your ingredients

As you don't receive single eggs or tomatoes in slices, we need to create more ingredient items in the format that we will receive them. For this example we will create a 'Eggs x 18' as the eggs we order comes in boxes of 18. We will receive several boxes at a time, but during stock receiving we can just specify the number of boxes we received.

You create a product called 'Eggs x 18'. If the box of eggs has a specific barcode number, you can use that, otherwise you can just enter a stock code. Select 'Ingredients' as category. Select Product Prices.

Enter the cost for the product (the amount you pay for the box of 18 eggs). The price including and excluding tax can be ignored as we will not be selling this product.

Select 'Sub Items'.

You add the 'Egg' prodcut as a sub item and change the number to the number of eggs in the box (18). You can then click on 'Apply Cost to Sub Items' so that the cost for individual eggs can be calculated. This will later be used to calculate the cost of items on your menu that uses eggs (and other ingredients).

In the same way you can add other items that you receive, for example bag of tomatoes, bread, etc.

Create your Recipe (Restaurant Menu Item)

For this example, we will create an 'Egg & Cheese Hamburger'. You create the product. You can specify the price but you don't need to specify the cost as it will be calculated for us. This time you also select a category that is not hidden in the POS modules. You then select 'Sub Items' and select that it is a compound item.

You then add all the ingredients for your recipe (see image above). Once you added the items, you can click on 'Calculate Cost from Sub Items'. That will then automatically calculate the cost of the product using the costs of the sub items (that was also automatically calculated for us).

More Examples

1) Training video - Draught beer example

2) Keeping track of stock - Potatoes example

3) Setting Up Cocktails In Your Restaurant

Stock Ordering and Stock Management

For each ingredient you can specify a ROP (Reorder Point). See Advanced Settings in Restaurant Product Setup. When this level is reached, the ingredient can automatically be added to a Supplier Order (see Supplier Orders and Stock Running Low).