Frequently Asked Questions

Your account starts with a main location — review its name and details to match your business. Then add your first inventory items (ingredients, materials, or supplies), record a purchase to start tracking costs, and make your first sale. Check out the Quick Start guide under Documentation for a step-by-step walkthrough.

Yes! You can import inventory, transactions, recipes, and other data via CSV files. Each section has its own import button — for example, go to Inventory > Ingredients and use the import action there. We support bulk imports so you can migrate from spreadsheets or other tools quickly.

Ingredients are the raw materials you purchase (flour, beads, wax). Finished goods are items you produce from ingredients using recipes. Products are what you sell to customers, which can include finished goods, services, or items you resell.

Go to Settings > Team and send an invitation via email. The invited person will receive a link to create their account and join your organization. You can assign roles to control what each team member can access.

There are four roles, in decreasing order of access:

• Owner — full access to everything including billing, data management, and team settings.
• Manager — can manage account settings (team, locations, attributes, preferences, tax categories, pricing tiers, transaction methods) but cannot access billing or data management.
• User — can view and create inventory, transactions, recipes, and reports, but cannot access account settings.
• Auditor — read-only access to inventory, transactions, recipes, and reports — cannot create or modify any data.

Locations represent physical places where you store inventory or conduct business, like your home kitchen, storage unit, or market stall. Inventory, transactions, and production runs are scoped to a location, so you can track stock levels separately at each place.

Use the Transfers feature under Optimize. Create a new transfer, select the source and destination locations, add the items and quantities you're moving, and confirm. Both location inventories are updated automatically.

Yes! Ardent Seller supports extensive unit conversions. You can purchase flour by the pound and use it in recipes by the cup, and the system handles the conversion automatically.

When you create a recipe and add ingredients with quantities, Ardent Seller calculates the cost per batch based on your current ingredient costs. As your ingredient prices change (through new purchases), your recipe costs update automatically.

Batch tracking lets you assign lot or batch numbers to production runs. This is especially useful for food producers who need traceability for food safety compliance, or for any business that needs to trace products back to their source ingredients.

Each plan includes a storage cap for photos and file uploads. Pay As You Go has no cap — it is billed by usage instead.

• Free — 200 MB
• Maker — 1 GB
• Artisan — 5 GB
• Workshop — 20 GB
• Pay As You Go — unlimited storage, billed at 0.25 credits per GB per month based on peak usage.

You can view your current storage usage in Settings > Billing. This shows how much storage you have used and how much is available under your current plan.

When your storage limit is reached, new file and photo uploads are blocked. You can free up space by deleting existing files, or upgrade to a plan with a higher storage cap. Your existing files remain accessible and are not deleted.

Free and Pay As You Go accounts go through three stages if left inactive — warning, lock, and deletion. Paid subscription plans (Maker, Artisan, Workshop) are fully exempt. Timelines:

• Free plan — warning at 30 days inactive, account lock at 60 days, permanent data deletion at 75 days.
• Pay As You Go — warning at 60 days inactive, account lock at 90 days, permanent data deletion at 180 days.
• Paid plans (Maker / Artisan / Workshop) — no inactivity timer — accounts remain active for the duration of the subscription.

For Free accounts, logging in or recording any transaction resets your inactivity clock. For Pay As You Go accounts, only recording a transaction counts as activity. Any qualifying activity immediately resets your account to active status.

Locked accounts can be reactivated instantly by logging in — it is a self-service process with no waiting period. Your data is preserved while your account is locked. The lock screen provides an "Export My Data" button so you can download a complete copy of all your data as a JSON file before the deletion deadline. Once data is permanently deleted, it cannot be recovered.

Simply use your account regularly. For Free plans, logging in at least once every 30 days is enough. For Pay As You Go plans, record at least one transaction every 60 days. Alternatively, upgrade to a paid subscription plan (Maker, Artisan, or Workshop) to be fully exempt from the inactivity policy.

Ardent Seller offers a comprehensive suite of reports including Income Statement, Profit & Loss, Sales & Expenditure, Inventory Valuation, Depreciation Schedule, Equipment Usage, Traceability, Price List, Schedule C, and more. All reports can be filtered by date range and location.

Yes! You can export individual sections as CSV from their respective pages (e.g., Inventory > Ingredients). For a complete bulk export of all your account data, go to Settings > Data Management and click "Export All Data" to download everything as a single JSON file. If your account has been locked due to inactivity, you can also export your data directly from the lock screen before reactivating.