In a lot of food businesses with multiple outlets, food is being prepared in a central kitchen to be transferred to the multiple outlets afterwards. Here's how this works in Apicbase.
Setting up an outlet as a supplier
Even without a central kitchen, stock items get transferred between outlets all the time. This can be registered in Apicbase with the 'transfer between outlets'-functionality. If you don't know how to do this yet, click here.
If your business does have a (or multiple) central kitchen(s), where food is being prepared for multiple outlets, the way to go is to make use of 'internal ordering'-feature in Apicbase. Here's a step-by-step guide:
- Go to 'Outlets settings' and select the outlet which you want to use as a supplier-outlet. This is your central production kitchen where the other outlets will be able to order from.
- Next, click the 'Create Supplier Outlet'-button, highlighted in the screenshot below.
- After doing so, a pop-up will appear where you can enter the Supplier Outlet's information. The most important field is that of the email address. Your internal orders will be sent to this address.
- After clicking the 'Save'-button, the selected outlet will be available in your list of suppliers underneath the procurement module, preceded by the
- symbol.
Your outlet is now available as a supplier for ingredients, but keep in mind that only the recipes that are set as stockable are available for internal ordering (learn more). There should be packaging information available with the Supplier-Outlet set as the supplier for the items and recipes you want to order internally (learn more).
Creating an internal order
At this point, it is possible to place orders at this supplier-outlet from your other outlets. Here's how:
- Go to the "Procurement"-module and click "Create Orders".
- Next, select the Outlet for which you want to create the order.
- Place the order, similar to how you would place a regular purchase order with one of your suppliers (Click here to learn more about generating purchase orders using Apicbase).
- Set the Delivery Date & - Time, and click 'E-mail Order'. A pop-up window will appear, showing an overview of your order and the possibility to add remarks.
- If your order is complete, click 'Confirm'.
- You can now find your order in the 'Ordered'-section in the Procurement-module.
- If the order has been delivered, click the 'Receive'-button just as with a regular order. If you want to learn more about receiving an order, check this article.
- On the next page, you can still adjust the delivery, before saving it. Clicking the 'Save Delivery'-button will update your stock and the invoice will be available in the 'Delivered'-orders section.
Internal orders for the supplier outlet
As the central production kitchen, you'll find your orders in the "Internal Ordering" section. This will only be available if you have set a supplier outlet.
- To view new orders, click 'Incoming Orders'.
- To view prepared orders, click 'Picked Orders'.
- To view shipped orders, click 'Shipped Orders'.
How to handle incoming orders?
For the supplier-outlet, once an order comes in, it is visible in the "Incoming Orders" section. When you want to prepare the order, click "Pick Order".
Doing that will allow you to enter the shipping date and time, the picked quantity and the possibility to add remarks to the different items in the order.
You can also change the picked state to "Part" if you could only pick a part of the ordered amount, or to "None". If you pick "Part" you can fill in the picked amount in "Picked Qt.".
You can also add items that were not ordered by filling in the item name, the picked quantity and you can add remarks in the bottom row. In the example below, we added "Beef stock" to the order. Click the "Disc" symbol to the right of the newly added item to save it to the order.
After clicking the save/Disc symbol, the newly added item appears like this in the order.
You can add remarks in the text field.
You can click "Save Draft" if you want to resume the preparation of this order at a later time without losing the information already entered.
Check the "Update Stock" box if you want to update your inventory. Leave this unchecked if the inventory does not need to be updated.
The necessity to leave the "Update Stock" box unchecked can for example occur when the intake of an order was forgotten and the stock was already updated via a stock count.
If your order has been picked in the inventory, click "Pick and Ship" to send the order right away. In Apicbase, this order will now be visible under "Shipped Orders".
If you click "Pick and Save", the picked items are saved and ready for shipment. In the "Picked Orders" section, you find the picked orders that are not yet shipped.
If needed you can check the list of aggregated orders. Check this article to learn how.
To ship the order later, simply press the "Ship"-button, next to the order. Doing this will move the order to "Shipped Orders".
You can also aggregate