Apicbase makes it easy to manage multiple outlets by letting you assign ingredients, recipes, and menus to specific locations. This ensures every outlet has the right items for smooth operations, accurate inventory, and consistent menus.
Table of content
2. Linking and Unlinking Items
2.1. Manually Linking/Unlinking
3.1. Exception: Internal Ordering
1. About the Linking system
Linking in Apicbase refers to the process of assigning ingredients, recipes, and menus to specific outlets. This ensures that each location has access to the correct items for ordering, production, and inventory management. For example, if Outlet 1 serves Italian cuisine, you would link dishes like "Spaghetti Carbonara" to it. However, you should not link that recipe to Outlet 2, as they specialize in Asian cuisine and do not need access to the recipe or its ingredients.
By properly linking items, businesses can maintain efficiency, reduce errors, and ensure consistency across multiple locations. This article explains how linking works in Apicbase, and how to manage it effectively.
Linking items is crucial for maintaining operational efficiency across outlets, and here are the key reasons why:
- Accurate Ordering: Only linked items will appear on the Ordering page, ensuring outlets can order what they actually need, and no more.
- Inventory Actions: Linked items are used in stock actions such as counting, wasting, and creating, ensuring easy inventory management and preventing unnecessary items from being included.
- Production Planning: Items linked to an outlet will be available for inclusion in the production plan, ensuring that items not linked to the outlet are excluded.
- Menu Management: Each outlet will only see the relevant menu items, preventing overlap and reducing errors in food preparation.
- Consistent Reporting: Properly linking items ensures that only relevant products appear in reports, preventing items that don’t belong to an outlet from showing up in the reporting.
Keep in mind that linking items to an outlet is not only beneficial but necessary. In fact, whether you are operating one outlet or several, linking is essential to make any item available on all pages in Apicbase for that outlet. If a library has one outlet, this linking also needs to be done!
If you're working in an outlet, placing an order, counting stock, etc., and can’t find a certain item, chances are this item is not correctly linked to your outlet.
2. Linking and Unlinking Items
Apicbase allows you to link or unlink ingredients, recipes, and menus either individually or in bulk.
2.1. Manually Linking/Unlinking
This method is ideal for managing a small number of items.
- Go to the detail page of the item you want to link (Ingredients, Recipes, or Menus). Make sure you are in EDIT mode.
- Navigate to the Outlets Tab.
- Select or deselect the outlets where you want to link or unlink the item.
- Click Save to confirm your changes.
2.2. Bulk Linking/Unlinking
Bulk actions save time when managing multiple items, especially during the initial setup or in big updates.
- Go to the Ingredients, Recipes, or Menus list.
- Use the checkboxes to select multiple items (1).
- Click on the Selection dropdown (2) at the top right corner.
- Choose Outlets (3), then select Add or Remove (4).
- In the pop-up, select or deselect the outlets you want to update.
- Confirm your changes to apply them.
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3. Indirect Linking
Apicbase follows a structured, hierarchical linking system. When a menu is linked to an outlet, all the recipes within that menu are linked, along with the subrecipes inside those recipes and the ingredients within those subrecipes. Why do we do this? Essentially, if an outlet has access to a menu, it means they need to be able to see the recipes inside. And if an outlet needs to make a recipe, it should have access to the ingredients required to make it. This logic underpins the entire linking system: If you need the dish, you need the ingredients. This eliminates the need to link each ingredient and/or recipe individually, saving time and ensuring consistency.
This process is known as Indirect Linking, and it helps keep everything organized and streamlined. On the other hand, Direct Linking refers to the action described in the previous section, where we specifically connect an item (menu, recipe, ingredient). For example, if I link my Menu A to an outlet, the menu itself is directly linked, while the recipes inside it, and the ingredients inside those recipes, are all indirectly linked.
The difference between direct and indirect links only lies in how items are connected to an outlet. But both types of links ultimately serve the same purpose, ensuring the correct items are available at the correct outlet. There’s no difference between them in terms of functionality, a link is a link, whether it’s direct or indirect.
Here is a list of the linking relations that Apicbase makes:
- Ingredients inside recipes – When you assign a recipe to an outlet, its ingredients are automatically made available to the outlet as well.
- Sub-recipes inside recipes – When a recipe contains sub-recipes, linking the recipe to an outlet will automatically link those sub-recipes too.
- Recipes inside menus – When you assign a menu to an outlet, all the recipes within that menu become available to the outlet.
- Menu > Recipe > Ingredients – By linking a menu to an outlet, all the recipes within the menu, along with their respective ingredients, are automatically linked as well.
💡 While it may seem like a lot of work to link every individual ingredient or recipe to each outlet, it’s often more practical to link them in groups rather than individually.
To simplify linking, create a menu with all the recipes that an outlet should have. Once this menu is linked to the outlet, all the recipes and their ingredients will be linked automatically. This method allows you to manage all the items on the menu, and any updates made to the recipes in the menu will automatically apply to the outlet.
This approach reduces the amount of work needed and ensures that the system remains flexible and manageable.
3.1. Exception: Internal Ordering
If your company uses Internal Ordering in Apicbase for a Central Kitchen, you most likely have recipes that are prepared centrally and delivered to other outlets. These recipes are stockable and have an Internal Supplier that delivers them to other outlets. In these cases, the logic described above is not respected anymore.
Why is this different? Well if an outlet can buy a recipe from the central kitchen, we will assume they don't need to prepare that recipe themselves, and therefore the ingredients (and sub-recipes) in that recipe will not be indirectly linked to the outlet.
Let's make an example: Restaurant A sells a recipe, "Chicken Alfredo". To make it, they need, among other things, "Alfredo Sauce". This recipe is not made in-house, but ordered to the Central Kitchen of the company (the Internal Supplier). The Central Kitchen needs to prepare this recipe, so it needs to have access to the ingredients as well. Linking-wise, we will directly link "Chicken Alfredo" to Restaurant A, and all the ingredients inside it will be indirectly linked except the ingredients from the "Alfredo Sauce". On the other hand, we will directly link "Alfredo Sauce" to the Central Kitchen, and all its ingredients will be indirectly linked to it as well.
This setup saves Restaurant A from complex ingredient management, as they don’t need to worry about the raw components of the "Alfredo Sauce", and yet have access to the pack of "Alfredo Sauce" they order from the central kitchen.
To summarize, if an outlet can order a stockable recipe from an Internal Supplier, the ingredients of that recipe will not be indirectly linked to the outlet through the recipe.
4. How to view Outlet linking
It's important to visualize where your ingredients, recipes, and menus are linked to ensure everything is properly assigned and accessible at the correct outlets. This helps maintain consistency and avoid errors in your operations. You can visualize this linking in 2 ways:
- In the Item’s Outlets Tab
In the Detail page, in viewing mode, each ingredient, recipe, or menu has an Outlets Tab that shows to which outlets it is linked.
In the table, you'll see a "Manual Linked" column. If this column says "Yes", it means the ingredient is directly linked to that outlet. If it says "No", it doesn't necessarily mean the ingredient is unlinked. The item might still be indirectly linked through recipes or menus, which are listed in the following columns.
In other words, if the outlet is listed here, this item is linked to it, regardless of whether the Manual Linked column says "Yes" or "No."
For example, in the image, The Messy Café shows "Yes" in the Manual Linked column, meaning the ingredient is directly linked to the outlet. But The Perfect Lounge shows "No," which doesn’t mean the ingredient isn’t linked. In this case, the ingredient is linked to The Perfect Lounge through recipes, as shown in the Available Through Recipes column, where it appears in the list for that outlet.
If an outlet doesn't appear in this table, it means the ingredient is not linked to that outlet. For instance, the outlet "The Fresh Bistro" is missing in the table of the picture, which means this ingredient is not linked in any way to that outlet, and thus will not appear when ordering, counting, wasting, etc. in that outlet.
- In the Overview Lists
Navigate to the Ingredients, Recipes, or Menus list and use the Outlets Filter to display items linked to specific outlets. This filter helps identify missing links and ensures correct assignments across locations. The list will show ingredients linked both directly and indirectly (as there is no difference), providing a comprehensive overview of all connections. In the picture we can see all items linked to the outlet "The Perfect Lounge".
5. Unlink discontinued items
When you try to unlink an item that has already been in use before and is still in your stock, you may notice that it still appears on certain pages, such as the count and stock pages, and still appears in your ingredient/recipe list when using the outlet filter. This happens because the item is still considered linked as long as it remains in your stock, regardless of whether its quantity is positive or negative.
To completely discontinue an item and remove it from all pages of an outlet, you need to count the stock down to 0 in a stock count, indicating that the item is no longer in stock. Only then will it be fully unlinked and disappear from all pages.