Recipes and production runs

Before you start, open these. They are all under Stock in the menu: Recipes, Production runs and Inventory Transactions.

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.

If you change what you buy before you sell it, by baking, milling, assembling, packing or brewing, then your raw materials and your finished goods are different items.

Something has to turn one into the other, honestly.

A recipe describes the change

A recipe has a name, an SKU, a description, its inputs and its outputs.

It says what it takes to make what. On its own it moves no stock at all. It is the formula, not the act of doing it.

Outputs is plural on purpose. One process can produce more than one thing. That is how you describe a by-product properly, instead of squashing it into one line.

A production run is the act

A production run is actually doing it, and it is recorded as a stock movement.

It uses up the inputs and produces the outputs in one go. So both sides of your stock move together, and neither can be forgotten.

The movement records which recipe was used and how many batches were made. Where the item is lot tracked, it also records the output’s batch reference, expiry and where it came from. Production cost records what the run cost you.

Why one action and not two

You could record flour as wasted and bread as received, and your quantities would come out roughly right.

What you would lose is the connection.

There would be no record that this flour became that bread. So no way to trace a finished product back to its ingredients. No basis for working out a cost per unit. And no way to answer a recall.

Two entries that happen to balance are not the same thing as one record of what actually happened.

Yield tells you something

The run records what you really got. Not what the recipe predicted.

Where those two differ, pay attention. A yield that is always short means one of three things. The recipe is wrong. The process is losing material. Or something is going out of the back door.

Recording the honest number is what makes that visible.

Recording the expected number because it looks tidier destroys the only signal you had.

Try it

On staging.feeprime.com, build a recipe with two inputs and one output. Run it, and watch three stock numbers move in one action.

Then run it again with a deliberately short output, and see what the yield tells you.