Overview: Stocktake

The purpose of this overview is so that you can make an informed decision on whether or not you want to use this functionality.

The first thing you need to decide on is whether or not the benefits that your school are going get out of the stocktake functionality will outweigh the time and effort required to manage it. This feature was added into My Recipe Manager as some schools keep certain base ingredients in their storeroom e.g. plain flour and were keen to have some sort of basic stock (inventory) control.

Note: this functionality only impacts one of the available shopping list reports i.e. if you decide not to use the stocktake feature it will not affect anything else you can do in My Recipe Manager. If you change your mind sometime in the future you can start using stocktake whenever you wish to, providing you adhere to its requirements.

Stocktake is an optional feature of My Recipe Manager, meaning you don’t need to use it to produce a shopping list. If you don’t use the stocktake feature your shopping list will not take into consideration any existing ingredients you may have in your storeroom meaning you will need to manually cater for this prior to purchasing the ingredients on your shopping list (refer to the example below).

Example: if you have 3kg of plain flour in your storeroom and your shopping list requires you to purchase 5kg you would manually adjust your printed shopping list to purchase 2kg of plain flour instead of 5 kg.

If you choose to use this feature, your shopping list will take into account any existing ingredients you may have in your storeroom providing they are correctly recorded under stocktake and your shopping list will automatically reduce the quantity required to be purchased for those ingredients (refer to the example below).

There is no 'magic wand' when it comes to stock (inventory) control unless you spend large amounts of money on technology, otherwise, managing a stocktake system requires some sort of human intervention and effort.

What are the pros and cons of using stocktake?

Pros

Quantities on your shopping list will automatically adjust based on the ingredient quantities in your storeroom but only for the ingredients which are being tracked by stocktake.

Cons

For stocktake to function correctly the information within it must always be accurate.
Someone at your school will need to take ownership of it, understand how it works, learn how to use it correctly and maintain it on a constant basis.
Every ingredient that you wish to maintain stock control over must be added into stocktake. An ingredient only has to be added once unless you delete it from stocktake whereby you would need to re-enter it.
When the ingredient is first added into stocktake you need to record how much of that ingredient you have on hand i.e. you will have to do a physical count or weigh the ingredient.
If you purchase more of that ingredient for your storeroom i.e. to increase the quantities in your storeroom then you must adjust the quantity on hand for that ingredient in stocktake.
If an ingredient quantity on your shopping list reduces because it is being tracked by stocktake you must adjust the quantity on hand for that ingredient in stocktake but only after you have purchased all of the ingredients on your shopping list and distributed them back to the classes (refer to the example below).

Example: if you have 2kg of plain flour recorded under stocktake and your shopping list requires you to purchase 5kg of plain flour, your shopping list will recognise that you have 2kg in your storeroom and adjust your shopping list to only purchase 3kg. Once you have purchased your ingredients and distributed all of them to the classes you must go into stocktake and update the quantity of plain flour from 2 kg to 0 kg. This must also be done before you create your next shopping list.

Note: we would not recommend using stocktake for fresh or perishable ingredients e.g. eggs, fresh fruit etc.