You just subscribed to Apicbase, congratulations! You'd like to start mass uploading all your ingredients and recipes, we understand. Before you do so, we recommend you to consider the following things:
- Units
Think about what unit you want to use when you upload the ingredient in Apicbase. It can be useful to put certain items with variable weights into the software as a 'piece', or you can choose to input the weights or volumes of ingredients. Whatever you decide here has an impact on the later use of the software.
Obviously, Apicbase makes the conversion from grams to kilograms, centiliters to liters, etc. Even kilograms can be converted to liters, tablespoons to grams, and so on. Unfortunately, our magic ends there.
Imagine you upload an ingrediënt with 'piece' as a unit, a cucumber for example. When you're creating one of your salad-recipes later, you want to add 100 grams of cucumber to this recipe. This is not possible, you can add half a piece of cucumber, 1 full piece, 2 pieces, even 0,001 pieces of cucumber to your salad. Apicbase doesn't know the weight of this ingredient since you specified the unit as 'piece'.
Read this article to find out everything there is to know about using 'piece' as a unit.
If you want to work with nutritional values, it is key that all your ingredients have a unit that is not only "piece". So if you define an ingredient only as a piece, Apicbase will not be able to calculate how many grams you use and therefore not calculate the nutritional value for this recipe.
When you use units other than gram, kilogram, tablespoon, teaspoon... You have to take into account that the conversion rate is standard 1/1 if you have not set a custom conversion rate. This means 1 litre equals 1 kg. The safest way to go, if nutritional values are important to you, is to enter all your ingredients in grams.
- Packaging
The next thing to consider is how your supplier sells this article. If your supplier sells crates of 24 bottles of 25cl of a soft drink, it would be inconvenient if you register that soft drink with package sizes of 6L. It is better to enter the package as 24x25cl. These packages and units you enter determine how you will have to count your inventory later.
Read everything here about packaging. - Integrated suppliers
Some of the bigger suppliers are integrated into Apicbase. This means you can get their products uploaded to your library, together with all available information on these products. This will save you a lot of time.
To find out which suppliers we are currently supporting integrations with, go to your library settings and then click supplier integrations.