Stock control

Organising with folders, categories and tags

One folder tree shared by ingredients, stock items and recipes, plus categories and tags that Stock and your POS product catalogue now share.

Organising with folders, categories and tags

Stock gives you three ways to tidy a long list, and they do different jobs:

• Folders are where an item lives — one place each, like a filing cabinet.
• Categories are what an item is — one per item, shared with your product catalogue.
• Tags are anything else you want to mark — as many as you like per item, also shared with your product catalogue.

One folder tree, shared by everything

Ingredients, Stock Items and Recipes now share one set of folders per location. Previously each of those three pages kept its own separate tree, so a folder called "Bar" had to be created three times and the three could quietly drift apart.

Now there is one tree. Open any of the three pages and you see the same folders, each showing a count of how many of that page's items are filed inside it — so a folder can hold ingredients, stock items and recipes at once, and each page tells you how many of its own kind are in there.

Above the tree you'll find All and Unfiled. Unfiled is everything that hasn't been put anywhere yet, and it is worth checking now and then — nothing is ever hidden just because it hasn't been filed.

Creating and rearranging folders

Creating a folder is one field and Enter — there is no dialog to fill in. Use the Add folder button at the top of the panel for a top-level folder, or the actions menu on any existing folder to add one inside it.

To rearrange, drag a folder onto another folder to nest it, or out to the top level. A folder can't be dragged inside itself or inside one of its own sub-folders; if you try, Stock tells you so rather than doing something surprising.

One rule about folder names: they can't contain a forward slash. Stock uses that character internally to describe where a folder sits in the tree, so a name containing one would be ambiguous — "Dry Goods/Flour" as a single folder would be indistinguishable from "Flour" filed inside "Dry Goods". Use a dash or a space instead.

Deleting a folder that still has things in it is refused, and Stock tells you how many sub-folders and items are in the way, so nothing is ever lost by accident.

Filing items into folders

Three ways, whichever suits what you're doing:

1. From the row — each row has a folder cell you can click and change, which is quickest for a single item.
2. From the selection bar — tick several rows and choose Move to… to file them all at once.
3. By dragging — drag a row straight onto a folder in the panel.

All three do the same thing, so use whichever is closest to hand.

Tags and categories are shared with your POS

This is the change most worth knowing about, because it works in both directions.

Tags in Stock and tags on your products are now the same list. A tag you create in Stock appears in your product catalogue, and a tag created there appears in Stock. Renaming one renames it everywhere, and archiving one removes it from both places. There is one tag vocabulary per location, not one for Stock and a separate one for your menu.

That is usually what you want — "Vegan" or "Contains nuts" means the same thing whether it is on an ingredient, a recipe or the menu item you sell — but it does mean a tidy-up in one place is a tidy-up in the other. To help with that, the tag list under Settings → Tags & Categories shows you how many things are using each tag on each side, so you can see before you rename or archive anything whether it is in use somewhere you weren't thinking about.

Removing a tag archives it rather than deleting it, precisely so that nothing loses its labels. Archived tags stop appearing in pickers but keep their existing assignments, and creating a tag with a name you previously archived brings the original back rather than making a duplicate.

Categories work the same way. The category list you choose from in Stock is your product catalogue's category list plus any categories you have created for Stock — so if you already grouped your menu into "Produce", "Drinks" and so on, you can file ingredients under those same headings instead of rebuilding them.

When you type a new category name in a picker, Stock checks whether one already exists at that location first. If it does, it selects that one instead of creating a near-identical second heading. Categories created from Stock are marked as Stock categories, so they never appear as new headings in your menu structure.

You can leave an item uncategorised — it shows as Uncategorised and is not hidden from anything.

Which should I use?

• Reach for folders when you're thinking "where do I find this" — by supplier, by storage area, by section of the venue.
• Reach for categories when you're thinking "what kind of thing is this", and especially when your menu already has a grouping you'd like to reuse.
• Reach for tags when something needs more than one label, or a label that cuts across everything else — allergens, dietary marks, "seasonal", "check weekly".

None of the three is required. A brand-new Stock setup with no folders, no categories and no tags works exactly as it always did; these are here for when a list has grown long enough that scrolling it has stopped being practical.