Sellable vs Purchasable

What the nine 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 nine categories — ingredient or material, 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, 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
Ingredient or material	—	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 ingredients, 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 — ingredients and 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
Ingredient or material	Edible and non-edible inputs transformed by production. Tag the edible ones Food.	A soap maker's oils, lye, and fragrance; a baker's flour, butter, and eggs.
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 ingredients or 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 ingredients and materials, 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 ingredients and materials directly, so a simple one-stage ingredients-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 support time or units

Labor and Service are the two categories with no quantity tracking — they carry cost and price instead of stock on hand. Choose time units (minutes, hours) or Unit for per-piece labor and per-credit services. A Labor item prices work inside recipes, while a Service is something you sell directly, like a workshop class, a custom design fee, or a PAYG credit.

Food is a tag and a product type, not a category

There is no separate food category. Edible and non-edible inputs share Ingredient or material, which supports count units (eggs, lemons) as well as weight, volume, length, and area. Inputs carry Used in tags; today the only tag is Food. The Food tag shows the food section — the linked food, allergens, allergen status, label ingredients, and nutrition — while untagged inputs such as wax, lye, and wicks never show allergen fields. Tags can be changed on a saved item with no conversion: it stays the same item. The one lock: the Food tag can't be removed while the item goes into a Food product, directly or through a subassembly, in a recipe or a production run. Set those products to Other, or, if the item isn't eaten (a stick, a cake board), change its category to Packaging.

Products and finished goods carry a product type: Food or Other. The product type decides whether the cottage food label, the allergen declaration, the pre-print allergen check, and the nutrition panel apply, so an oat-and-honey soap set to Other is never offered a cottage food label. Adding an input to a Food product's recipe (directly or through a subassembly), or setting a product's type to Food, tags those inputs Food automatically, with a notice. The Source guide covers tags, and the Deliver guide covers product types.

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

Build recipes and run production batches in Ardent Seller: subassemblies, finished goods, equipment, nutrition facts, and pre-print allergen checks.

Source Guide

Guide to sourcing in Ardent Seller — manage ingredients, packaging, vendors, and purchase orders.

Deliver Guide

Sell with Ardent Seller: products, services, variants, pricing tiers, customers, and sales, plus allergens and cottage food labels for food products.