Cosoft

This is a part of a series of Solutions on creating a menu in Aura. You can find the other parts here:

1. Creating Stock - Categories
2. Creating Stock - Items
3. Creating Menu Items - Categories
4. Creating Menu Items - Menu Items
5. Creating Picklists

The full guide can be downloaded as a PDF here:

AURA Menu Creation Guide

2. Creating Stock Items

Once categories have been added, the stock items themselves can be created. Navigate to the Stock Items page:

To begin, click the [+] to add a new stock item, and capture the following fields (items marked with a * are required):

• Stock Code* - This is a short, unique identifier for the stock item. While not necessary, it’s recommended that a logical, consistent and scalable naming system be used, to make it easier to identify a stock item by it’s code (e.g, DC1 for “Drinks - Cans - 1st Item”, or PBL for “Packaging - Boxes - Large” etc.).

• Category* - Select the category that this item belongs to.

• Stock Type* - Select if an item is ‘Food Cost’ or ‘Non Food Cost’:

• Food Cost - An item set as Food Cost will be included in the Gross Profit (GP) report, as items that are counted as part of the cost of production of products.

• Non Food Cost - A Non-Food Cost item will not be included in the GP report, but will still be available in the stock report and stock worksheets to be tracked and counted. These items are counted as Expenses in the Income Statement report.
  

• Desired Level - This is the ideal level of stock to be kept on hand at any given point in time - This is useful particularly for the Order Manager Add In (found in Activities > Add Ins > Order Manager) which can create custom orders based on your desired levels. It is not required, however.

• Exclude from Worksheets - Selecting this option will remove the selected stock item from your stock take worksheets and stock takes, regardless of whether it is marked as a controllable item or not.

• Description* - Displays the full description for the selected stock item. This description will be used to locate and display the stock items in every list of stock items in the Aura system and reports.

• Unit of measure* - This field identifies the measuring or counting method for the stock item (e.g KG if the stock is counted in Kilograms, LT if counted in litres, or EA if an item is counted individually, like a soft drink can.)

• Controllable - This is by default ‘No’. All item set to ‘Yes’ will appear in in the daily “Controllable” stock takes and worksheets. If an item needs to be counted daily, set this to Yes.

• Wastage %* - Displays the average percentage of the stock item that is lost during the preparation of the selected stock item. This will be the difference between the 'Prepped' and 'Unprepped' values shown in the stock takes.

• Vat Exempt - This must only be set if the item is exempt from VAT.

Click the [✔] to save the changes.

A correctly captured stock item will now look something like this:

Click the [+] to add the next item. Repeat the above steps. New items will appear in the stock list in the lower left of the page:

2.1 Manufacture, Auto Manufacture and Sub Menu Items

Once primary items have been captured, we can now create any Manufacture or Sub Menu items.

Manufacture

A manufactured item is stock that is made up from other stock (such as batter, sauces, dough etc.). Normally, these would need to be captured on a per-batch basis under Stock Manufacture (Activities > Stock > Manufacture Stock) in Backoffice. However, if a stock item is only made whenever the menu item is ordered, then it may make sense to set the item as Auto Manufacture. This way, the system will automatically calculate the amount of stock used to make the item (according to the set recipe) whenever the parent item is sold.

The control button have the following functions:

Adding an item [ < ] prompts you to set the quantity of stock being used in the recipe. This can be edited by double-clicking the item.

In our example, we have made a simple Salsa Portion manufactured item to be sold with our hot dogs. Because we make the salsa to order, and don’t want to manually capture the stock production every day, we have set the item as Auto Manufacture. Now, when any menu item with the Salsa Portion stock item in its recipe is sold, the ingredients will automatically be taken out of stock on our stock reports, and the Salsa Portion item will be added into stock.

Sub Menu

The Sub Menu option provides a similar function to Auto Manufacture, but has a key difference: an item set as Sub Menu doesn't represent a physical stock item, but rather as a group of items that are always sold together. Because it isn't a "real" stock item, any item set as Sub Menu do not appear in Stock reports at all!

In the example above, we’ve created a Chip Pack item, with all items would be used every time a bag of chips is sold. Now, we can just add Chip Pack to any menu item that includes a bag of chips, and all the items on the recipe will be automatically deducted in the same way a Menu item recipe is, to the Theoretical column on the Stock Variance report. If the recipe changes for all chip packs in future, there is only one recipe to change instead of updating every menu item that contains chips. This can streamline a menu creation and maintenance process quite a lot.

Part 3: Creating Menu Items - Categories