Ingredients that are mapped to products will pull the purchasing details from those products to properly cost out in your recipes.
When adding/creating products in opsi, it's important to include as much purchasing details as possible to better cost out the mapped ingredients.
The following fields are provided for purchasing details:
Price - total price of the product
Packaging Unit - the purchase packaging unit (ex. case)
Inner Pack Qty - the quantity included within the packaging, associated to the inner pack unit
Inner Pack Unit - the inner pack unit (ex. bottles)
Unit Qty - the quantity associated to the unit of measurement (ex. ml)
Unit of Measurement - the primary unit of measurement (ex. lbs)
Set "Inner Packaging" measurements as equal - By turning on this option, the Inner Pack Qty / Inner Pack Unit will be treated as equivalent to the Unit Qty / Unit of Measurement. This is particularly useful for products like produce. For instance:
Without the option:
Inner Pack Qty / Inner Pack Unit: 10 heads
Unit Qty / UoM: 1 lb (each)
This implies each head weighs 1 lb.
With the option enabled:
Inner Pack Qty / Unit: 10 heads
Unit Qty / UoM: 1 lb (in total)
Here, 10 heads together are considered to weigh 1 lb.
Activating this feature changes the interpretation of the measurements from per-item to per-pack basis.
Note: not all of these fields are required, but the more provided the easier costing will be.
Let's use an example of a purchase product of Olive Oil. You purchase Olive Oil for $100 by the case, which includes 6 bottles, each bottle is 250ml. This may read on an invoice as "case/6/250 ml btl".
The proper way to input these details into an opsi product would be:
Price: $100
Packaging Unit: case
Inner Pack Qty: 6
Inner Pack Unit: bottle
Unit Qty: 250
Unit of Measurement: ml
When using an integration like Ottimate (formerly Plate IQ), these fields will automatically be pulled from the invoices and applied to your products.
Now, here's the fun part (we know, the above is a drag). Because you provided all of those purchasing details for Olive Oil, and mapped it to an "Olive Oil" ingredient, that ingredient can be used in a recipe as any volume unit (ml, l, tsp, tbsp, fl oz, cup, pint, quart, gallon) or as bottle and be costed properly. This is because you specified both a volume unit in the purchasing details, and the bottle unit, and opsi can do all the conversion magic.
What if you wanted to use the Olive Oil ingredient as a weight unit within a recipe instead of volume? You would then need to create a volume to weight conversion on the ingredient level.
Understanding how product purchase details affects ingredient costing is the first step to mastering recipe costing.