Article Contents
What are Batches?
Batches, also known as sub-recipes, or preparations, create prepared items from your existing inventory. These are used for mapping your POS Items and costing purposes.
Some examples of batches include:
Sauces, marinades, aioli, seasoning mixes, garnishes, salad dressings etc.
Prepared vegetables (sliced, pickled, sautéed, roasted, caramelized, etc.)
Side dishes and other recurring menu items (Side salads, fries, burger patties, etc.)
Take out packages (boxes and utensils).
Converting an item's measurement type from one to another (weight to volume, etc.)
In other words, you’re transforming items from your inventory into something else.
When you create a batch, you also select whether it will be inventoried. For example, if you make a pasta sauce and jar it for later use.
Purpose
The main purpose of batches is to make the POS Mapping process easier.
Your POS Items are the final product, however, each POS Item (especially food items) could include multiple prepared items in its recipe.
Instead of adding the individual ingredients of the prepared items to each POS Item, you can create a batch. This acts as a shortcut, because it groups the ingredients together, allowing you to add a single item instead.
This reduces the duplication of effort, and simplifies costing. If a change is made to the recipe of the batch, it applies to every POS Item it’s used in automatically.
Think of batches as the building blocks of your recipes. Putting in the effort to set up your batches properly will save you time when adding recipes, and make things easier to manage moving forward.
You can even add batches as an ingredient in other batches.
To learn how to create a batch, please see:
Unit Conversions
The batches feature can also be used for converting the unit of measurement of your items.
Most recipes have ingredients by volume, but you’ll purchase and count most of your food ingredients by weight.
For example, a recipe may call for an amount of an ingredient in cups, but the item is ordered and inventoried in either lbs, kgs, full units etc.
With batches, you can set how much of an ingredient is contained in a cup, tablespoon, teaspoon etc.
You'll then be able to select these conversions when adding the ingredients to the POS Item. By setting up these conversions, your costing will be more accurate.
To learn more about conversions, please see:
Prepped / Processed Yields
If you purchase an item by weight, the whole amount may not be sellable/usable in a dish. First it has to be prepped/processed. This includes trimming meat, peeling produce, or even cooking.
There are two ways to account for this:
Setting the yield at the item level
Creating a batch and setting the yield of the modified item
To learn more, please see: