Suppliers and Products lie at the heart of the KitMan System, set suppliers up once and they are used in raising Purchase Orders and receiving deliveries, in monitoring expenditure and profitability on a daily basis and performing a stock take.  Products are used in recipes, in purchases and in stock takes, when a price is changed, from the date it takes effect, all recipes, purchases and stock values are updated automatically.

Tip

When setting up a Supplier always fill in as much as possible – this appears on Purchase Orders so can help suppliers to process orders much more easily.

Products

We suggest setting up products in batches of up to ten.

The unit of measure cannot be changed once the product has been created so it is worth spending a few minutes considering how a product will be used by different parts of the system.

Example One a box of 40 1/2lb blocks of butter could be setup
in a number of different ways

Count	x	Size	Unit	Notes
1	x	1	box	We do not have ‘box’ as an option because it is not easily divisible if you need 50g in a recipe for example.
1	x	40	ea	Possible but once again 50g in a recipe would be 0.2ea.
40	x	250	g	Preferred – easy to order, easy to stock take and easy for recipes. grams versus kilograms is whichever you prefer, but we would suggest standardising on one or the other and using that unit for all weights.
40	x	0.25	kg

Example Two a box of 200 butter portions weighing 7g each

Count	x	Size	Unit	Notes
1	x	1	box	We do not have the option.
1	x	40	ea	Preferred – you can then use 1ea in a recipe but you would be ordering in multiples of 1x200ea, put 7g in the specification for information purposes.
40	x	250	g	Not much use as you would never use butter pats to weigh out 100g of butter.
40	x	0.25	kg

Final Tips:

• Think of each being the individual item, not the box it comes in.
• Use each not weight or volume for all single portion items such as yoghurt pots, cans of drink, individual portion cereal etc.
• For weights and volumes agree to work in either g and ml or kg and ltr, whichever you prefer then stick to it.
• Be as descriptive as possible in the product name so that you can easily distinguish the item and use the common term first so that similar products are grouped together when listed alphabetically e.g. Butter Salted or Herbs Parsley Curly Fresh or Cheese Cheddar Mature Coloured.