Stock control
Splitting Stock by area (Bar, Kitchen…)
Group suppliers, stock, invoices and kitchen screens by area so a large venue with separate operations sees only what's relevant.
Splitting Stock by area (Bar, Kitchen…)
If you run a large venue where the bar and the kitchen operate almost like separate businesses — different suppliers, different stock, different staff — Areas let you split Stock so each side sees only what's relevant to it, instead of one long list of everything.
Every account starts with two areas already created for you, Kitchen and Bar, so there's a working example to start from. You can rename them, delete them, add more (a cellar, a function room — whatever suits your venue), or simply ignore the feature entirely. Nothing changes for you until you choose to use it.
Where areas are set up
Go to Settings → Areas in Stock. Add an area, click its name to rename it, or remove one you don't want.
There is only ever one list of areas, shared across everything: the same areas group staff roster shifts, filter Stock and route kitchen tickets. So if you also use staffing, you'll see the same list under Settings → Areas & roles there, and a change made in either place shows up in both.
New areas apply to every location unless you pick a single one, which is what most venues want. If you have more than one location, you'll be asked which the area belongs to.
Two things worth knowing before you remove one:
- Hiding is usually what you want. Hiding an area takes it out of the area picker and out of every filter, but leaves everything that was filed under it alone — so you can bring it back later exactly as it was.
- Deleting is shared, and it isn't only Stock. Anything filed under a deleted area — products, suppliers, invoices, stock items, recipes and rostered shifts — becomes unassigned, and unassigned things show up in every area. Nothing is deleted except the area itself, but if the area applied to every location, that happens at every location.
Filtering Stock's lists
Once you've created areas and assigned some suppliers, stock items, ingredients, recipes or invoices to them, an area switcher appears at the top of Stock, next to your location picker. Choose "Bar" and every list — Stock Items, Ingredients, Recipes, Invoices, Suppliers, Ordering and Product Mapping — narrows to what's assigned to the bar.
Anything you haven't assigned to an area yet stays visible everywhere. A brand-new ingredient, or an invoice that just came in, is never hidden just because nobody has filed it under an area yet — you'll always see it until you decide where it belongs. This is also why turning the feature on never removes anything from view: if you never assign an area to anything, every list looks exactly as it always did.
Shared items — ice, cling film, anything both sides use — can be assigned to more than one area at once, so they show up wherever they're needed rather than forcing you to pick a side.
Routing kitchen tickets
If you use kitchen display screens, you can assign each screen to one or more areas, and assign a product to an area from either the product's own settings or from Product Mapping. When an order comes in, an item routes to the screens covering its area.
A few things worth knowing:
- If a product is already pointed at a specific screen or station, that setting always wins — areas only come into play for products that aren't pinned to a particular screen.
- If a product's area doesn't match any screen (a common slip while you're still setting things up), the ticket goes to every screen instead of getting lost. A misconfigured area can never cause an order to go missing.
- If you don't use areas at all, kitchen routing behaves exactly as it always has.
Invoices
When an invoice comes in, Stock proposes an area for it — usually based on the supplier, or on the items in it if they all belong to the same area — and shows you why it made that suggestion. You confirm or change it before it's saved; a suggestion is never applied silently.
Should you use this?
If you run everything as one pool, you can ignore Areas completely — they add no extra steps and change nothing about how Stock behaves. They're worth setting up once your bar and kitchen (or however your venue is split) have grown enough that a shared list of every supplier, ingredient and invoice has become more clutter than help.