Raw Materials & Production

A raw material is stock you buy in bulk and turn into what you actually sell - a bag of flour, a bale of cloth, a 50 kg drum of oil. The catalogue keeps it apart from the finished packs, each pack says how much of the raw it takes, and a Production Run moves the quantity from one to the other.

Where it is in the app

Turn it on first: Settings > Master > Raw Material (Premium plan). The app then shows Master > Raw Materials as its own list, renames the ordinary list to Finished Products, and adds Vouchers > Production Run and Reports > Production Register.

The whole flow

flowchart TD
    P[Purchase the raw material
bulk unit · kg · litre · metre] --> RM[(Raw material stock)]
    RM --> L[Finished packs linked to it
each with a Volume/Weight]
    L --> PR[Production Run
consume raw · produce packs]
    PR --> FS[(Finished stock, by pack)]
    FS --> BC[Print barcode labels
for the packs produced]
    BC --> S[Sale at the counter]
    L -. instead of a run .-> AS[Reduce raw at SALE time]
    AS --> S

Two routes out of a raw material, and an item takes one or the other - never both.

Creating the items

Step	Where	What to enter
1. The raw material	Master > Raw Materials > New	Name, the unit you buy the bulk in, purchase rate, opening stock. This is the item your purchase bills will carry.
2. The finished packs	Row menu on a raw material - New Finished Product, or Finished Product List to see the ones it already feeds	The pack as the customer buys it: name, size, sale rate, MRP, barcode - plus the Volume/Weight it consumes.
3. More of the same shape	Clone Product from inside the finished list	Asks only for the new Volume/Weight, so a 250 g, 500 g and 1 kg pack of the same thing are three taps apart.

Volume / Weight - the link that does the work

Volume/Weight is how much of the raw material one pack takes, in the raw material's own unit. A 250 g pack off a raw material kept in kilos is 0.250. The field has a picker beside it with the common values, so you can choose 250 g instead of working the decimal out yourself.

No volume, no run. A pack with no Volume/Weight, or with no raw material linked to it, cannot be produced - the app has no way to know what to draw down. It says so at the moment you pick the item.

Changing an item's type

The row menu in either list converts an item that was set up as the wrong sort:

Convert to Raw Material - a finished product becomes a raw material.
Convert to Finished - a raw material becomes an ordinary finished product. Refused while finished packs still draw from it: unlink those packs first, otherwise they would go on feeding off an item the catalogue no longer calls raw.
Convert to Raw Finished Item - turns a plain finished product into a pack that hangs off a raw material; you then pick the raw material and its Volume/Weight.

Stock already posted is untouched by a conversion - only the item's type changes.

Production Run

Vouchers > Production Run. One run is one document, with its own voucher number and posting date, so a batch made last night can be entered this morning.

On the screen	What it means
Consumed	What went in. Usually the raw material, but a run may eat a finished item too.
Produced	The packs that came out. Only packs linked to a raw material can be listed here.
From / To godown	Chosen per side: the raw comes out of one warehouse and the output goes into another when that is what happened.
Expected quantity	Suggested from the raw consumed and the pack's Volume/Weight. It is only a suggestion - type what actually came out.
Yield	Produced against expected, on the total bar. Blank when nothing declared a ratio, so "no ratio known" never reads as a loss.
Batch	With batches on, the lot consumed and the lot being filled are picked per line.

Cost follows the material: what the inputs were worth is carried onto the items produced, so a finished pack has a real cost without anyone typing one.

Production Register (Reports > Production Register) lists the runs in a date range. Open one to see what it consumed and produced, edit it, or delete it - a delete removes every stock leg and puts back the cost the run had rolled onto the produced items.

The other route: reduce the raw at sale time

Some shops never build stock in advance - the pack is made as it is sold. On the finished pack, switch on Add/reduce raw material stock? and selling the pack draws its Volume/Weight straight out of the raw material. The pack itself then keeps no stock of its own, so it has no opening stock and no minimum-stock figure.

One route per item. A pack set to reduce its raw material on sale cannot also be produced in a run - the raw would go down twice and the pack's own stock would climb for ever. The app blocks it and names the switch to turn off.

Barcodes & labels

The packs are ordinary catalogue items, so each carries its own code, MRP and sale rate and prints like any other label - see Barcodes & Label Design. The usual moment is straight after a run: produce the packs, then print the quantity you have just made.

Settings & permissions

Settings > Master > Raw Material switches the whole thing on (Premium). Settings > Product > Stock Maintenance must be on for any of this stock movement to exist. Permissions: Add / Edit Product to create and convert items, Stock Adjustment to save a run, View Reports for the Production Register.

Reports

Production Register (runs with their inputs and outputs), Stock Register and Stock Value across both halves, and the Reorder Stock Report on the raw materials so the bulk is re-bought before the line stops.