Purchase versus Sell Units

[Vibes]

I am trying to make sense of the purchase versus sell options in advance inventory. I am currently using Composite and Production items, but just can't get the combination correct. Here are two examples ...

I buy our House Red Wine in 3L and 5L boxes and sell it as a 145mL glass. I have created three items to do this; 

1)  House Red Glass (this is what I sell to a customer)

2) a 3L Box that is a Composite Item and a Production made from 20.689 House Red Glasses (above item 1)

3) a 5L Box that is a Composite Item and a Production made from 34.482 House Red Glasses (above item 1)

The cost does not update when I receive boxes and the inventory count for the House Red Glass remains unchanged when I receive boxes.

What am I doing wrong here?

 

I have the same problem with cases of beer and soda. I buy 24 at a time and sell individually. This is more precise. I am never going to be off a little because of a light or strong pour. Other than loss/damage ... there are 24 in a case and we sell them one at a time. There are 0.04166666(repeating) cases of beer in a bottle. So I cannot make a beer a part of a case, I have to make a case 24 beers for it to come out right.

 

I tried converting a purchased case to 24 beers on my purchase orders, but the decimal limitation prevented me from ever getting the right amount I paid calculated into the extended cost field.

 

Edited June 16, 2022 by Vibes

[Vibes]

Four days and not a single reply. I was hoping there would be an easy answer to this problem. I run a bar, restaurant, and cafe. Assuming this software is suitable for me, this cannot be hard ... what am I missing?

 

Thanks!

Vibes Team

[Angelika]

Hello! 

 

In this case, I can suggest you create one main item "Red Wine 1L" (not available for sale) with stock tracking option enabled, which will allow you to see all the calculations of how much of this item has been sold, purchased. 

 

 

All the other items: Red Wine 3L, Red Wine 5L and Red Wine glass 145ml will be composite items with Red Wine 1L as component. 

Now you need to create them. For the Red Wine glass 145ml, you need to activate "composite item", add the Red Wine 1L as component with quantity 0,145. 

Each time you will make a sale of wine glass, the stock of the "Red Wine 1L" will decrease for the quantity which was sold. 

For item Red Wine 3L in the quantity field you need to input 3,000 and for the Red Wine 5L - 5,000 and enable "production" option. 

Now when you will make a purchase order for item "Red Wine 3L", you need to input how many cases you want to order and receive it.

After that, you need to create disassembly for the item "Red Wine 3L", meaning if you ordered 3 cases of that item, you need to input "3" in the quantity: 

The "in stock" value of item "Red Wine 1L" will change after making a disassembly. 

[Angelika]

Now for the beer case: 

 

First, you need to create item beer (sold by each, track stock enabled)

Then you need to create item beer 24 psc (this item will be used to order by boxes). Make it composite with quantity 24 (the number of beers in case) with production enabled:

Now you need to make a purchase order for item "beer 24 psc", input how many cases you want to order, receive the purchase order. The last step is to create a dissasembly for that item, meaning if you ordered 4 cases of that item, you need to input "4" in the quantity:

After that, the stock of "beer" will be automatically updated.

 

[Vibes]

On 6/20/2022 at 6:13 PM, Angelika said:

Now for the beer case: 

 

First, you need to create item beer (sold by each, track stock enabled)

Then you need to create item beer 24 psc (this item will be used to order by boxes). Make it composite with quantity 24 (the number of beers in case) with production enabled:

Now you need to make a purchase order for item "beer 24 psc", input how many cases you want to order, receive the purchase order. The last step is to create a dissasembly for that item, meaning if you ordered 4 cases of that item, you need to input "4" in the quantity:

After that, the stock of "beer" will be automatically updated.

 

This is an interesting process ... and exceedingly manual, if I understand it correctly. It would be nice (as a bar) to have an automatic disassembly for all cases of beer down to their bottle component. I rarely sell a case of beer at bar prices, so it would make more sense for the manual production step to be in that direction. Actually I don't sell cases at all ... I always just sell 24 individual beers if you REALLY want to by something at the end of the night.

I have not tested this, but when I buy a truck load of beer that contains 12 pallets of beer ... each holding 100 cases ... I assume I can do  the same disassembly process for the truckload to pallets to cases to bottles? 

[Vibes]

On 6/20/2022 at 5:31 PM, Angelika said:

Hello! 

 

In this case, I can suggest you create one main item "Red Wine 1L" (not available for sale) with stock tracking option enabled, which will allow you to see all the calculations of how much of this item has been sold, purchased. 

 

 

All the other items: Red Wine 3L, Red Wine 5L and Red Wine glass 145ml will be composite items with Red Wine 1L as component. 

Now you need to create them. For the Red Wine glass 145ml, you need to activate "composite item", add the Red Wine 1L as component with quantity 0,145. 

Each time you will make a sale of wine glass, the stock of the "Red Wine 1L" will decrease for the quantity which was sold. 

For item Red Wine 3L in the quantity field you need to input 3,000 and for the Red Wine 5L - 5,000 and enable "production" option. 

Now when you will make a purchase order for item "Red Wine 3L", you need to input how many cases you want to order and receive it.

After that, you need to create disassembly for the item "Red Wine 3L", meaning if you ordered 3 cases of that item, you need to input "3" in the quantity: 

The "in stock" value of item "Red Wine 1L" will change after making a disassembly. 

I noticed you have it as Red Wine 3L here and changed it to 1L in the others. You must have run into the decimal limitation as well. This is very annoying and I am not the first person to run into the  problem it seems. I hope you are able to solve this issue soon.

[Angelika]

1 hour ago, Vibes said:

This is an interesting process ... and exceedingly manual, if I understand it correctly. It would be nice (as a bar) to have an automatic disassembly for all cases of beer down to their bottle component. I rarely sell a case of beer at bar prices, so it would make more sense for the manual production step to be in that direction. Actually I don't sell cases at all ... I always just sell 24 individual beers if you REALLY want to by something at the end of the night.

I have not tested this, but when I buy a truck load of beer that contains 12 pallets of beer ... each holding 100 cases ... I assume I can do  the same disassembly process for the truckload to pallets to cases to bottles? 

Hello! 

 

Unfortunately, automatic disassembly is currently unavailable. Can you explain to me how you would like it to work for you so I could pass it as feature suggestion to the development team? 

 

Yes, you can do the same process for the truckload. 

[Angelika]

1 hour ago, Vibes said:

I noticed you have it as Red Wine 3L here and changed it to 1L in the others. You must have run into the decimal limitation as well. This is very annoying and I am not the first person to run into the  problem it seems. I hope you are able to solve this issue soon.

Red Wine 1L item is for you to easily track stock of wine, so it's a component of the composite items. Red Wine 3L/5L you are using to make a purchase order, because it's the item you are really purchasing. 

[Vibes]

On 6/30/2022 at 4:48 PM, Angelika said:

Red Wine 1L item is for you to easily track stock of wine, so it's a component of the composite items. Red Wine 3L/5L you are using to make a purchase order, because it's the item you are really purchasing. 

So disassemble the 3L, 5L, and 20L containers into 1L containers? ... and then disassemble the 1L into 0.145L glasses? This is several manual steps, if I understand  you correctly. If I sell five-hundred 145 mL glasses in a night ... 

I think this is another example of a reason for auto-disassembly; which I will address in your other response.

[Vibes]

On 6/30/2022 at 4:10 PM, Angelika said:

Hello! 

 

Unfortunately, automatic disassembly is currently unavailable. Can you explain to me how you would like it to work for you so I could pass it as feature suggestion to the development team? 

 

Yes, you can do the same process for the truckload. 

I am new to the product, so I am working with limited knowledge. If I am missing something, please let me know. 

Every business I have been involved with has products that are sold individually, but purchased in bulk. I will give you two examples. Beer bottles are bought by the case and sold by the bottle. As a retailer, I never sell a case of beer to a customer. I would sell 24 bottles and then discount it if that is what was required. So, when I buy a case of beer ... I ALWAYS want 24 bottles to appear immediately in inventory.

In my current situation, I have a product I sell called House Red Wine. Most of the time it is a specific brand that I buy in bulk and it is shipped in 3L, 5L, and/or 20L containers. I sell it in two ways. Either a 145mL glass or a 500mL carafe. When I sell a glass, I want to auto-disassemble wine from my multiple options above to fulfill the glass. The same is true for the carafe.

Thanks for asking!

Vibes Team

[Vibes]

2 hours ago, Vibes said:

I am new to the product, so I am working with limited knowledge. If I am missing something, please let me know. 

Every business I have been involved with has products that are sold individually, but purchased in bulk. I will give you two examples. Beer bottles are bought by the case and sold by the bottle. As a retailer, I never sell a case of beer to a customer. I would sell 24 bottles and then discount it if that is what was required. So, when I buy a case of beer ... I ALWAYS want 24 bottles to appear immediately in inventory.

In my current situation, I have a product I sell called House Red Wine. Most of the time it is a specific brand that I buy in bulk and it is shipped in 3L, 5L, and/or 20L containers. I sell it in two ways. Either a 145mL glass or a 500mL carafe. When I sell a glass, I want to auto-disassemble wine from my multiple options above to fulfill the glass. The same is true for the carafe.

Thanks for asking!

Vibes Team

Just to clarify, I think there are two options here. For the beer, I would want to have it immediately "auto-disassemble" because all I sell from the case is individual bottles. Even if I sell 24, I sell them as individual bottles. However, for the wine, I sell glasses and carafes ... so "disassemble on sale" would be what I wanted for this "source" stock item. Also note that the wine has multiple source options for the glasses and carafes.

[Angelika]

On 7/1/2022 at 12:36 PM, Vibes said:

So disassemble the 3L, 5L, and 20L containers into 1L containers? ... and then disassemble the 1L into 0.145L glasses? This is several manual steps, if I understand  you correctly. If I sell five-hundred 145 mL glasses in a night ... 

I think this is another example of a reason for auto-disassembly; which I will address in your other response.

You need to disassemble only the 3L, 5L and 20L wine into 1L, because you buy them in such quantities. Wine 1L is for your convenience and to make calculations easier. Since wine sold by glasses consists of Wine 1L, and you are not buying wine by glasses, you are not making disassembly for item Red Wine glass. It will take automatically from the stock of Red Wine 1L after you make a sale and the receipt will be synced with back office. 

[Vibes]

On 7/2/2022 at 9:26 PM, Angelika said:

You need to disassemble only the 3L, 5L and 20L wine into 1L, because you buy them in such quantities. Wine 1L is for your convenience and to make calculations easier. Since wine sold by glasses consists of Wine 1L, and you are not buying wine by glasses, you are not making disassembly for item Red Wine glass. It will take automatically from the stock of Red Wine 1L after you make a sale and the receipt will be synced with back office. 

Problem is ... I sell 3L/5L Boxes as well as pour from 3L/5L boxes. I do not want them to become 1L boxes and then glasses unless I need them in the moment. Restaurants need an option to have things auto-disassembled. It is a good feature. No other way to look at it.

[Angelika]

Hello! 

Thank you for your feedback about auto-disassembly! 

I will pass it as a suggestion to the development team. However, please, note, that some of the suggestions may not be always implemented or implemented fully. 

[Vibes]

On 8/29/2022 at 2:15 PM, Angelika said:

Hello! 

Thank you for your feedback about auto-disassembly! 

I will pass it as a suggestion to the development team. However, please, note, that some of the suggestions may not be always implemented or implemented fully. 

I appreciate you passing this on for consideration. Here is some additional feedback.

Orange Juice is used in many things in a cafe/restaurant/bar ..

I serve it in a glass, I mix it with espresso, it goes in 100 different cocktails, and it is used in food. If I had auto-disassembly available to me ... I could change the cost of my OJ and let that cost trickle down to the products it affects. As it stands ... I have to keep this cost outside of the system and remember where it is used and adjust the prices manually.

There are a lot of nice-to-haves on my list and I am going to add a couple here. If you had auto-disassembly and were I to change the cost of OJ ... it would be nice to have margin thresholds on items that notified me when my margins dropped below a certain percentage on an item that used the OJ after I changed the price. You could also add a auto calculation of the new price based on a minimum margin as well ... but I suspect I would not use it because when I change prices, I have too print new menus. However, other retailers might enjoy such a feature. Remember that humans like sensible prices, and an option to auto-change a calculate price from 7.87 to 7.99 should be included here too.

LOL ... maybe I should un-retire from beach bar life owner and get back into systems architecture and software development. I think I could design and implement a hell of a POS knowing what I have learned running this place. LOL! Kidding!

[AlexGal]

Hello,

This is still a huge issue since composite items for example (24 pack beer) cannot be added as a purchase. This means you have to add everything by one product. This means you have to manually divide the price of each item, when you register a purchase and it will accumulate errors since the number is not always an integer.

If you do the reverse way like instead of 24 pack contains 24x1 beer, going for 1 beer contains 1x1/24 pack composition, still horrible, because you have 3 digit fractional and will carry a lot of error.

I don't even know why disassembly is good, until this is not fixed, it has no useful function at all.

If you want to quickly fix the error, you should enable purchasing composite items which contains only 1 "ingredient".

Thank god I did not jump straight into buying the SumUp terminal and the Loyverse subscription.

How do other restaurants do the workaround? 

Edited October 13, 2022 by AlexGal

[Angelika]

Hello! 

 

You can add composite items to the Purchase Order if the "production" is enabled in this item's settings. 

 

[Vibes]

20 hours ago, AlexGal said:

Hello,

This is still a huge issue since composite items for example (24 pack beer) cannot be added as a purchase. This means you have to add everything by one product. This means you have to manually divide the price of each item, when you register a purchase and it will accumulate errors since the number is not always an integer.

If you do the reverse way like instead of 24 pack contains 24x1 beer, going for 1 beer contains 1x1/24 pack composition, still horrible, because you have 3 digit fractional and will carry a lot of error.

I don't even know why disassembly is good, until this is not fixed, it has no useful function at all.

If you want to quickly fix the error, you should enable purchasing composite items which contains only 1 "ingredient".

Thank god I did not jump straight into buying the SumUp terminal and the Loyverse subscription.

How do other restaurants do the workaround? 

Your solutions look good and are similar to the solutions we suggested months ago. Thank you for speaking up about this issue!

We did jump in :( ... we are going to stick it out for the rest of the year and see what Loyverse does to fix some of these issues. Currently the level of effort they are putting into future releases, bug fixes, and feature updates ... is not at all transparent.  We are opening 14 new stores across SE Asia in the next 36 months and right now we could not do it with Loyverse. We like this product and think it has great potential. Hoping for big changes!  

To answer your specific question, we had to discontinue using the advanced inventory and now do all of our inventory and control manually. The current tools in Loyverse are inadequate for a large restaurant/bar. I am anxiously (and hopefully) awaiting someone from Loyverse taking interest in these problems. I will donate my time to help them get it right. Very motivated to help solve this issue.

Vibes Management

[AlexGal]

24 minutes ago, Angelika said:

Hello! 

 

You can add composite items to the Purchase Order if the "production" is enabled in this item's settings. 

 

I had a call with your collegue and we couldn't make the cost tracking work.   The problem with production, that it infers cost from the composite ingredients costs. Therefore registering a purchase order with the cost data is not usable for a restaurant or bar because the data is not inherited into the meals/drinks.

Example:
1) I register a purchase of a package which contains 24 cokes for example.
2) The "24 coke" is a composite item, containing 24 amount of "Coke" (which is an individal item what is being selled) I register a 24pack purchase with a cost.
3) In production mode, i disassemble the 24 pack, so the inventory is updated and after that i have 24 pieces of Coke. "?" field says: "The cost of item that will be distributed among its components". The inference in the production mode shall be Pack cost ---> Individual cost. Because its distributed among its components.
4) The cost of the Coke doesn't update, the package buying and disassembling has no effect on the "Cost" of the Coke, therefore all the margin, cogs, every calculation is wrong.

I think this is a bug, the intention is that if i buy 3L of wine and i use 0,1l in a meal, then whenever i buy 3L wine, the cost shall be calculated automatically in the meal with the moving average calculation that Loyverse already have. This moving average cost calculation works only for single items.

I had an argument with your college he thinks this is a new feature, i think this is a bug, every POS system including this, intends the track COGS% which makes our life easier. We need to infer all our costs from the purchases not theroetical numbers what we manually input in random times into the itemlist. This is the turning point where one should stop using google sheets. If this is not possible, the whole "Advanced inventory" without cost tracking, is just a basic inventory with no value for restaurants or bars.

[AlexGal]

48 minutes ago, Vibes said:

Your solutions look good and are similar to the solutions we suggested months ago. Thank you for speaking up about this issue!

We did jump in :( ... we are going to stick it out for the rest of the year and see what Loyverse does to fix some of these issues. Currently the level of effort they are putting into future releases, bug fixes, and feature updates ... is not at all transparent.  We are opening 14 new stores across SE Asia in the next 36 months and right now we could not do it with Loyverse. We like this product and think it has great potential. Hoping for big changes!  

To answer your specific question, we had to discontinue using the advanced inventory and now do all of our inventory and control manually. The current tools in Loyverse are inadequate for a large restaurant/bar. I am anxiously (and hopefully) awaiting someone from Loyverse taking interest in these problems. I will donate my time to help them get it right. Very motivated to help solve this issue.

Vibes Management

That's great! I'm worried that the owners of loyverse doesn't care about this because their product generates revenue anyway on different sectors and i think they never had any restaurant-like business, since this is a basic functionality issue. I guess this system is not for restaurants rather like shops where true composite items doesn't exist.

Too bad I like this software also. It is very fast and the side applications KDS, Sumup integrations are nice. But lacking the most important thing (tracking COGS) for a restaurant makes me stop to put more time in it, I wasted 2 days to fill every item, setup, research everything. I'll stick with google sheets.

Edited October 14, 2022 by AlexGal

[Vibes]

1 minute ago, AlexGal said:

That's great! I'm worried that the owners of loyverse doesn't care about this because their product generates revenue anyway on different sectors and i think they never had any restaurant-like business, since this is a basic functionality issue. I guess this system is not for restaurants rather like shops where true composite items doesn't exist.

Too bad I like this software also. It is very fast and the side applications KDS, Sumup integrations are nice. But lacking the most important thing (tracking COGS) for a restaurant makes me stop to put more time in it, I wasted 2 days to fill every item, setup, research everything.

My career before owning restaurants was as a Systems Architect building large systems like this for different clients. I am detecting a disconnect between the people making the decisions and the people they have designated in Product Management. I am hoping this connection will eventually happen and then a true evaluation of feature merit will take place. The Restaurant and Bar business is a massive market and their product is CLOSE to being sufficient in this area.

*fingers crossed*