Focus on getting your items loaded into the systems. The goal of this process is to ensure that we're importing items in a way that makes sense for the way you intend to count the item while taking an inventory count.
A few things to keep in mind:
Less is more - During your kickoff call, you may have heard us mention that we aim for 80% of your inventory. However, if it's less -- that's ok! It's very easy to add items into the system during an inventory count or after we do the initial item load. The focus is to ensure that we aren't putting the same item in multiple times, as it's very easy to add an item to the system. However, we do not delete items from the Craftable system -- which is why it's better to avoid importing anything that you're not 100% convinced of in your sheet.
We are loading your items, not your inventory counts - This process is to upload the backbone of Craftable where you're going to have the materials required to build recipes, map items to invoices, and also (most importantly) conduct your first audit! We recommend that you start with your first audit as soon as possible, but do note that you can always backdate a historic audit once we load your items into the system.
Focus on identifying the weight/volume - This is for recipe creation purposes. We need to understand how much of the product we're going to use the recipe to better provide a running perpetual inventory (theoretical inventory) for your system. This is notated in Column C (Unit Quantity) and Column D (Unit of Measure).
Many-to-one approach with items - At Craftable, we have a many-to-one approach with items. This means that if you purchase tomatoes from multiple vendors at different case sizes and prices, we want to nest all of the additional details under one specific item. See the visual below:
What’s in a name? - Once you receive your item import template spreadsheet for review, you may notice that the Item Name in column B looks long and clunky - especially if we used invoices to build it. This is your opportunity to update those item names to be more concise and recognizable so that your team will easily recognize an item when they count it during inventory.
How it appears on the Order Guide:
How we recommend setting it up in Craftable:
Categories are key - The categories that we assign to the items are also handy from an accounting perspective because you can assign entire categories to automatically flow into the corresponding GL accounts. Check out our article on GL Account Mapping for more information!
Please note, that if you send us invoices to build your item import template -- these invoices will not be uploaded into the Craftable system and will need to be uploaded separately once your items are imported if you intend to process these invoices in Craftable.