Some ingredients do not have a set quantity in grams, liters,..., but are defined as a piece. This article explains the different ways to work with the piece unit in Apicbase.
We advise working as much as possible with the unit grams in Apicbase. If everything is set in grams, the weight of your recipes is calculated automatically and you can nutritional values for recipes are calculated automatically if they are added to your ingredient information.
Volumes like liter and centiliter are also possible, but you have to set the correct conversion rate to be able to calculate the weight of the recipe automatically and make it possible to work with nutritional values. Read here how to set your conversion rate.
There are two ways of working with the unit "piece" in Apicbase. A piece is everything that is not a mass (g, kg) or a volume (l, cl,...). In real life it is often called other names like a bulb of garlic, or a bunch of carrots. In Apicbase this is all set in the "piece" unit if you can't set it in weight or volume.
Setting "piece" as the main unit
You can either set "piece" as the only unit. For example, if you have eggs. You order eggs by the box of 24 pieces. You can enter this as follows.
Defining a set package as a piece
You can, however, define an existing package as a "piece". For example, you create a package for a bottle of 33cl of orange soda. When you check the "Is piece" setting, this package can be used in recipes in cl, or as a piece. Especially when you are linking items to your POS system it can be easier when you can add a "piece" and don't always have to know the exact amount of one can, bottle,... You can make this package a "piece" by filling in the package information as follows. You can now also use this package in a regular recipe as a "piece". One "piece" will be seen as 33cl.
It is however not possible to define a package in pieces and then also check the "Is piece?" checkbox. You can only have one "piece" set for a package type. If we look at the first example, one egg is one piece. We can't check the "is piece" checkbox in this example, because 1 egg would be 1 "piece", but the package of 24 eggs would also be set as a "piece".
