Inventory overview
Inventory is the list of things whose stock you want to track — the ingredients, supplies, and packaging whose running quantity matters to you.
You decide what goes on the list. A material used in a recipe only goes on the list if you want its stock counted; everyday staples you simply re-buy on instinct can be left out.
Once an item is on the list, BuddyStall keeps a running count per store, moves it up and down with stock events, and flags it when it runs low.
Two tiers: master and store
Inventory follows the same master-and-store model as the rest of the app. The owner defines each ingredient once in the master inventory — name, unit, cost per unit, and the threshold for low stock.
Every store picks up the items it carries and tracks its own running stock for each. Two stores can hold very different quantities of the same ingredient; what they share is the definition.
What changes the stock
A store's stock count is not edited directly. It moves in response to the events below — most of them happen automatically as you run the day.
Restock
Whenever a tracked ingredient comes in, the count goes up — usually through a received purchase order, but also when the arrival is logged directly as an expense entry tied to the item. See Orders and Expenses.
Sales
Every sale at the POS automatically deducts the ingredients its recipe uses — no separate step. Items without a recipe do not change stock.
Refund
Refunding a past sale puts the recipe's ingredients back into stock — the mirror image of the original sale.
Waste
Spoilage, spills, expiry — record the quantity and the reason. Stock drops and the value is posted to Expenses at the same time.
Transfer
Move stock from one store to another. The quantity leaves the sending store and arrives at the receiving store in a single step — the owner's total is unchanged, only where it sits.
Stocktake
A periodic physical count. The verified quantity becomes the new baseline, and any difference from the expected stock is kept in the report history.
Recipes connect the menu to inventory
The link between a sale and a stock drop is a recipe. A recipe lists the ingredients a menu item uses and how much of each, optionally per size. With recipes in place, every sale at the POS deducts the right quantities from the store's stock — no separate step, no double bookkeeping. Recipes live on the master menu.
Low-stock alerts
Each master ingredient carries a low-stock threshold. When a store's stock of that ingredient drops to or below the threshold, the inventory screen marks it in red so it is easy to spot during a quick scan. Use it as a re-order trigger — the threshold is meant to be set high enough that you have time to place an order before the store actually runs out. See Inventory alerts for how alerts surface across the app.
Sales, refunds, and waste keep the count moving automatically, but small gaps still appear over time — measurement rounding, recipe approximations, unrecorded losses. A periodic stocktake brings the expected count back in line with what is physically on the shelf.