In many cases, ingredients are purchased by kilo or liter, and we don't have a specific package size for them. A Weighted Article is what we need!
Many articles, like food staples, meat, or fish, are usually purchased in bulk and don't really have a defined package size that we can input in Apicbase. Besides, we might want to order these in amounts other than round numbers.
These are what we call Weighted Articles. You can set up weighted articles in a few ways, either in bulk (via Excel) or manually, per ingredient. In this article, we will show you how to add them manually and how you can order these articles.
1. How to set up a new Weighted Article:
- To set up a new weighted ingredient you can go to Products -> Ingredients.
- Click on new -> new ingredient.
- Add a name to your new ingredient.
- Afterward, go to Packaging and Pricing and add a new package to the ingredient.
- In the window, check the checkbox 'Is Weighted'. This will automatically set the package quantity to 1.
- Select the Kg or L as a unit.
- Optionally, fill in the type, for example, "Bulk".
- Click 'Create' to save the package.
- Now you can add the supplier to the package and you are done!
The unit options for weighted articles are limited kilograms (Kg) or liters (L), for uniformity, and because these are the most usual units for bulk purchases.
If you changed an existing package to a weighted one, and the size of the package is now different than before. It's advised to do a stock count for this article to avoid mistakes in the stock.
1.1. Weighted articles via the Package file
In case we have a list of items to be input into the system, we might want to create/modify them via the Ingredient Package file in Excel. You can learn more about importing ingredients with this file in this article.
To create a weighted article via this Excel file, we will need to:
- Fill in the name of the ingredient.
- Put a 1 in the column Weighted.
- Put 1 as Quantity and choose the unit (either kg or l).
- Complete other information (package type, stockable, supplier information). Check this article for more details on how to fill in this file.
2. How to order a weighted article:
- Go to Procurement -> Create Order.
- Search for your weighted article.
- At the back, you will find the calculator icon where you can fill in a specific weight. Apicbase will do the conversion to the unit to be ordered (e.g. 450 g = 0.45 kg or 3 lb = 1.36 kg).
4. Fill in the wanted amount and add it to your shopping cart!