Sellable vs Purchasable

What the ten inventory categories mean, and what each one can do

An item's category decides what it can do

Every inventory item in Ardent Seller belongs to one of ten categories — raw material, food, subassembly, packaging, finished good, MRO, equipment, labor, product, or service. The category isn't just a label: it controls whether the item can appear on a sale or a purchase, whether its quantity is tracked, whether it can expire, and which recipes can use it. If a picker ever refuses an item you expected to see, the answer is almost always its category.

The capability matrix

Category	Sellable	Purchasable	Quantity-tracked	Expiry-tracked
Raw material	—	Yes	Yes	—
Food	—	Yes	Yes	Yes
Subassembly	—	Yes	Yes	—
Packaging	—	Yes	Yes	—
Finished good	—	Yes	Yes	—
MRO	—	Yes	Yes	—
Equipment	—	Yes	Yes	—
Labor	—	Yes	—	—
Product	Yes	—	Yes	—
Service	Yes	—	—	—

The golden rules

Only Products and Services can be sold. A sale picker will never offer your raw materials or finished goods — if you want to sell it, it must be a Product (or Service).
Products and Services cannot be purchased. They are what you make or assemble, not what you buy. Everything else — raw materials through equipment and labor — can appear on a purchase.
Finished goods and subassemblies are intermediates. They sit between your materials and your sellable products: you produce them, hold them in stock, and consume them when assembling the Product you actually list for sale.

What each category is for

Category	Purpose	Maker example
Raw material	Base materials transformed by production.	A soap maker's oils, lye, and fragrance.
Food	Edible ingredients, with expiry tracking.	A baker's flour, butter, and chocolate.
Subassembly	Something you make that goes inside something else.	A batch of soap base, or pre-wicked candle vessels.
Packaging	What your products ship or display in.	Jars, boxes, labels, ribbon.
Finished good	Completed made items not yet listed for sale.	Cured soap bars waiting on the rack.
MRO	Consumables that keep the workshop running.	Gloves, cleaning spray, sandpaper.
Equipment	Durable tools and machines you buy and keep.	A stand mixer, soap molds, a heat gun.
Labor	Your making time, priced per time unit for recipes.	Studio labor at an hourly rate.
Product	The sellable listing customers actually buy.	A wrapped soap bar, or a gift set assembled from finished bars.
Service	Sellable time or digital offerings.	A candle-making class, or a downloadable pattern.

Follow one soap maker's flow: olive oil and lye are raw materials, jars and labels are packaging, the cured bars on the rack are finished goods, and the wrapped bar (or three-bar gift set) listed in the shop is the Product. The Create guide walks this chain screen by screen.

What recipes can consume

The ingredient picker in a recipe filters by what the recipe makes (its target):

A recipe targeting a finished good or subassembly may consume raw materials, food, subassemblies, packaging, and MRO supplies — the manufacturing side of your workshop.
A recipe targeting a Product or Service may consume finished goods, subassemblies, packaging, labor, MRO supplies, and other products — and raw materials and food directly, so a simple one-stage raw-material-to-Product recipe is allowed. You don't need an intermediate finished good if your process doesn't have one.

Timed labor also enters any recipe through its steps, which cost the batch by duration. How a completed run then moves stock and cost is covered in How Stock Moves and How Costing Works.

Labor and services are time-based

Labor and Service are the two categories with no quantity tracking — you can't have "12 units" of an hour. They are measured in time units (minutes, hours) and carry cost and price instead of stock: a Labor item prices your making time inside recipes, while a Service is something time-based or digital you sell directly, like a workshop class, a custom design fee, or a downloadable pattern.

Only food tracks expiry

The Food category is the only one with lifespan and expiration tracking, because edible ingredients are the only inputs where "how old is it?" changes whether you can use it. If you're a baker or food producer, keep your edible inputs in Food rather than Raw material so expiration dates are available — the bakers use case shows this setup end to end.

How Stock Moves

How inventory quantities change in Ardent Seller — which transaction categories add or remove stock, and why nothing moves until a transaction is Completed.

How Costing Works

How Ardent Seller calculates costs — weighted-average costing from purchases through recipes and production runs to the COGS and margin on each sale.

Create Guide

Guide to creating in Ardent Seller — build recipes, manage subassemblies, and run production batches.