Availability and stock

RestroManage has two separate stock systems, and they answer different questions. Knowing which one you are in saves a lot of confusion.

Plans

Bistro, Brasserie, Signature, Enterprise

Can it be switched off?

No. It is part of every plan that includes it and cannot be switched off.

Needs first

Menu catalogue. This stays off until all of them are in your plan and switched on.

The two systems

Product availability (this page) counts the finished thing you sell. Six bottles of a particular wine. Twelve slices of cheesecake. It lives on the menu item itself, as Stock Quantity and Min Stock Level.

Pantry inventory counts ingredients — flour, oil, chicken thighs — and can deplete them automatically from recipes. That is a separate feature on a higher plan. See Pantry inventory.

A café selling bought-in cakes wants the first. A kitchen cooking from raw wants the second. Plenty of restaurants use both: pantry inventory for the kitchen, product stock for the bar fridge.

Setting it

On any menu item, Stock Quantity (optional) and Min Stock Level (optional). Leave both empty and the item is simply always available — which is right for most cooked dishes.

You can show either as a column on the Menu Items list: Stock and Min Stock are both in the Columns picker.

The low-stock alert

Low Stock Alerts is on the POS app’s dashboard, not the web one: it lists items that have fallen to or below their Min Stock Level, and says All items are well stocked when none have. See The dashboard on the device.

In the web dashboard the same information is a sort and a column on the Menu Items list, and an item left with a blank stock figure has unlimited stock and never alerts.

Making something unavailable right now

Three ways, in increasing order of permanence:

1. Set stock to 0 — the item is out, and comes back when you restock.
2. Switch Active off — the item disappears from the menu entirely. Right for a dish you are not selling this month.
3. Delete — moves it to the deleted list. Right for a dish you have retired.

For “we ran out of the fish tonight”, the first. Use the third only when you mean it.