Setting up what you hold

Before you start, open these. They are both under Stock in the menu: Stock Items and Inventory Categories.

Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.

Before you buy anything, decide how each thing you hold is going to be tracked. This decision is cheap now and painful later.

Raw, processed and packaged are different items

The most common setup mistake in farming is using one item for a crop that changes.

Wet beans and dry beans are not the same item. Neither are loose and bagged. Neither are graded and ungraded.

They have different quantities and different values, and one turns into the other through a process you want recorded.

   Cocoa, wet          what you buy from farmers
   Cocoa, dry          what drying produces
   Cocoa, graded 1     what sorting produces

Three items. The changes between them are production runs.

One item called “Cocoa” cannot say any of that. Your yield and your costs both vanish inside it.

Use lot tracking for anything with an origin

Set the tracking method to lot tracked for produce.

That level says which batch. A group of units sharing one identity, rather than one identity per unit.

Then set a shelf life, so an expiry date gets worked out whenever a batch is created. And set the allocation strategy to send out whatever expires soonest.

That is not the same as oldest first. It sends the batch that will go off first.

→ Full detail in Inventory items and Lots, batches and expiry

Your categories say what buying something means

Your inventory category says what it means when you buy the thing. For resale, raw material, consumable, or packaging.

This matters more in farming than in most businesses, because you buy all four.

Produce to sell on.
Produce as raw material for processing.
Fuel and chemicals, which get used up.
Sacks and twine, which are packaging.

Setting this on purpose is what keeps what it costs you to produce separate from what it costs you to keep the lights on.

Units are not decoration

Set the price unit of measurement and mean it. Kilograms. Tonnes. Bags of a stated weight.

Most farming arguments about quantity are really arguments about units.

A price agreed per kilogram and recorded per bag is wrong by a factor nobody spots until somebody checks the books.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, create a wet item and a dry item. Make both lot tracked, in a raw material category.

That pair is what the processing lesson needs later on.