Purchased Item Records: Best Practices

Purchased Items are the records that will be counted in Inventory and used as ingredients on Recipes. Purchased Item records will have a lasting financial impact when inventoried, so it is important to have one and only one Purchased Item record for each item used in your restaurants. 

Purchased Items can include food, beverage, supplies, paper, smallwares, etc. One way to prevent duplicate Purchased Items is to name them with the three best practice naming conventions:

1.  Use an All Caps Category name in front of items (e.g., BEER BTL Miller Lite)

2.  Omit pack size and brand names unless necessary (e.g., 12 oz vs 16 oz canned beer or brands of vodka)

3.  Avoid special characters (e.g., ?'!",.@#$%^&*)

All Caps Category Name

The uppercase category in front of the item name is helpful for sorting, filtering, and determining if an item already exists. For example, filtering by 'BEER BTL' will instantly display the current price of all bottled beer as well as list all existing items matching the text, which will help you confirm that 'Shiner Bock' is not in R365 yet and will need to be created. 

This is particularly helpful if there are misspellings, for instance, searching 'Miller Light' would not return 'Miller Lite', which is already set up and could potentially lead to a duplicate purchase item.

Omit Pack Size

Always picture the use of the item while creating new items and ask yourself, 'Can I use Product A interchangeably with Product B, even though they come in different sized packages? If the answer is 'Yes', then the item should be named the same.

Keeping pack sizes out of the item name helps prevent duplicates because you will not have a new item for each pack size. For example, if you buy Olive Oil by the gallon and the half gallon, then you will still only need one Purchased Item since they are going to be used the same way in recipes. This happens frequently when Vendors send substitute products.

Exception: Items that are not used the same way, such as bulk mayo vs mayo packets.

Omit Brand Name

Avoiding brand names prevents duplicates because you do not end up with extra items detailing each brand. For example, if you purchase two brands of Shredded Cheddar, depending on current case prices, if they can be used interchangeably as an ingredient, they should be named the same: CHEESE Cheddar Shredded.

Exception: Items like liquors which are used and inventoried differently based on brand.