The Production feature in Alto’s POS is useful for businesses that produce products in advance (eg., a bakery or a confectionery). By using this functionality, the business can plan and track inventory of both finished products and their components. The feature is available only for composite items.
To start using Production, follow the steps below:
- Go to Back Office > Products > Products. Tap on the composite item to edit or create a new one.
- Toggle on Use production (shows up only if the Composite item toggle is on) in the Inventory section to enable the Production feature for the product.
- New fields will show up in the Business locations section: In stock, Low stock and Optimal stock. You can manually enter actual stock and set low stock/optimal stock values by tapping on the corresponding business locations. Here, note that the manually entered ‘In stock’ value of the product will not affect the stock of its ingredients. The ingredients’ stock is affected when the Production or Disassembly (see points 11-16 below) feature is put into work. Now, save the product and let’s proceed to see how production works.
- Go to Inventory > Productions. Tap (+) and choose Production.
- Choose the business location and leave a text note in the Notes field if necessary.
- Then tap (+) in the Products section to choose the product to be produced. Repeat this step if you want to produce more products.
- Tap on the Quantity field to enter the quantity of the product to be produced and tap Done.
- Tap Save to finish production.
- Now, you will see that your inventory is affected as follows: the quantity and cost of the produced product has increased while the quantity and cost of the ingredients has decreased based on their use in the production. So, from now on not the stock of the ingredients but only that of the produced product will be affected when selling the product.
- The transaction is recorded in the system as a document with a unique number.
- Tap on the transaction to see its details. You can download the document (in pdf, csv or excel formats) or print barcode labels to the produced items by tapping on the vertical ellipsis (⋮) on the top right corner of the page.
- Also, you can use the Disassembly feature in Alto’s POS to disassemble a composite product into its components (or ingredients). To use it, go to Inventory > Productions and tap (+) to choose Disassembly.
- Choose the business location and leave a text note in the Notes field if necessary.
- Then tap (+) in the Products section to choose the product to be disassembled. Repeat this step if you want to disassemble more products.
- Tap on the Quantity field to enter the quantity of the product to be disassembled and tap Done.
- Tap Save to finish disassembly. Now, you will see that your inventory is affected as follows: the quantity and cost of the disassembled product has decreased while the quantity and cost of the components/ingredients has increased.
- The transaction is recorded in the system as a document with a unique number. You can undertake the same actions (download the document in different formats or print labels) as in Production by tapping on the document.
