Create Guide

Subassemblies are intermediate items that you produce and then use as components in other recipes or products. For example, a cake decorator might have a "Buttercream" subassembly that goes into multiple cake recipes.

Subassemblies use the same fields as other inventory items (Name, SKU, Description, State, Tracking Unit, Photos, Bin Location, etc.) and can be selected as the Target Inventory of a recipe. When you complete a production run for a recipe, the resulting quantity is added to the subassembly's inventory. Subassemblies (and finished goods) are producible and purchasable but not sold directly — you assemble them into a sellable product. See sellable vs. purchasable for how the categories fit together.

Equipment items track the tools and machines you use in your business. Beyond standard inventory fields, equipment has specialized features for depreciation tracking, maintenance scheduling, and usage logging.

Depreciation Fields

When depreciation is configured, the system automatically calculates and displays: Current Book Value, Accumulated Depreciation, Annual Depreciation Amount, and Remaining Useful Life.

Maintenance Tracking

The Maintenance History panel shows all logged maintenance events with date, type (routine, repair, inspection, replacement), performer, cost, and notes. You can export the log as CSV.

Usage Tracking

Equipment usage hours are automatically logged when equipment is assigned to production runs. The Usage History panel shows all usage records with date, procedure name, duration, and notes. You can filter by date range and export as CSV. The system also calculates Lifespan Used as a percentage based on total hours versus expected useful life (assuming 2,000 work hours per year).

Finished goods are the end result of your production process. They are created by selecting the finished good as a recipe's Target Inventory. When you complete a production run, the produced quantity is added to the finished good's inventory.

Finished goods support variants (different sizes, flavors, or configurations), each with its own SKU and optional price override. They can also have custom attributes defined in Settings, and support barcode/QR code generation for labeling.

Finished goods and products 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. Setting a product's type to Food tags every ingredient or material in its recipe (including those inside subassemblies) Food automatically, with a notice. Products and finished goods that existed before product types were added were sorted automatically — Food if their recipe used a food item, Other otherwise — so check yours, since that guess can be wrong. The inventory list has a product type column and filter to help, and you can retype many at once: select them and choose Product type → Set to Food or Set to Other.

Setting a product back from Food to Other doesn't untag its ingredients on its own. After the save, if any Food-tagged ingredient in its recipe no longer goes into a Food product, Ardent Seller asks whether to also remove Food from them and lists them. Choose Remove Food to untag exactly those, or Keep Food to leave them as they are.

Build it in this order

A recipe needs a target — the item it produces — and that item has to already exist in your inventory before you start the recipe. So the order is: add the materials and ingredients you buy (Source → Ingredients), add the product, service, finished good or subassembly the recipe makes (Deliver → Products for something you sell), then come here and build the recipe. Inside the recipe sheet, pick Target Inventory before adding ingredients: the ingredient list narrows to the items that can go into that target, so anything added beforehand may not qualify and will be flagged.

If you have not built a recipe before, let the app walk you through it: Workflows → Guided Recipe Build asks for the target first, narrows the ingredient list to what that target can take, and shows the ingredient cost roll-up before you save. When the recipe makes something you sell, it hands you straight into Recipe Costing to set a price against a target margin. Both are written up step by step on the Common Workflows page, including the manual click-path if you would rather not use a wizard.

Ingredients are added in the Ingredients section of the recipe — never in the Tags field on an inventory item. Tags are color-coded labels for filtering your lists; typing an ingredient name there creates a label, not an item and not a recipe line.

Recipe Fields

The target is locked once a recipe is saved — you cannot change an existing recipe's Target Inventory (or its variant or batch unit). This is intentional: it keeps the costed history of past production runs consistent. To build a sibling recipe for another variant of the same item — a new scent or size — use Duplicate: it asks what to call the copy and, when the target item has variants, which variant the copy should target. Every ingredient, step, and piece of equipment carries over, so you edit only what actually differs. To produce a different item, create a new recipe against it; Duplicate keeps the original's target item, so it won't re-point a recipe for you.

Drafting a Recipe

Set the State to Draft to save a recipe you are still working out — a draft can be saved with no ingredients at all, so you can capture a formula idea in one sitting and come back to it later. Drafts do not need the materials on hand: a draft inventory item (something you have not bought yet) can be picked as an ingredient, and appears with a "Draft" badge in the ingredient list. Once the recipe has at least one ingredient you can switch it to Active, which is what makes it available for production runs. A production run always needs its ingredients to be active items with stock behind them, so promote any draft ingredients to Active before you make a batch.

A recipe or production run sheet asks before you close it or leave the page with unsaved changes, including ingredients or steps you've added, removed or reordered: choose Keep editing to go back to them or Discard changes to go on without saving.

Ingredients Section

Add ingredients by searching your inventory. For each ingredient, specify the quantity and unit. The system automatically calculates the cost per ingredient based on current inventory costs, and shows a running total. Ingredients can be reordered by dragging, or one place at a time with the Move up and Move down buttons on each row, which work from the keyboard too. If an ingredient's current stock is insufficient, an "Insufficient quantity" warning appears.

The same item may appear on more than one row — sugar in the batter and again in the frosting, or a fragrance split across two stages. Keep the stages as separate rows if that is how you actually work: each row is costed and consumed in its own right, so the totals come out the same as a single combined row, and the production run records a line per row.

Equipment Section

Add equipment from your inventory to track which tools are needed. Optionally specify usage hours per piece of equipment. These hours are automatically logged to the equipment's usage history when a production run is completed. Reorder equipment by dragging or with each row's Move up and Move down buttons.

Steps / Instructions

Add numbered steps with instruction text, optional duration (minutes, hours, or days), and optional labor assignment (select a labor inventory item to include its cost). Steps can be reordered by dragging, or one place at a time with the Move up and Move down buttons below each step's number, which work from the keyboard too. The total recipe duration is the sum of all step durations.

Recipe Nutrition Facts

When a recipe makes an item whose product type is Food, or a subassembly that goes into one (its ingredients are tagged Food automatically), the recipe sheet shows a Recipe Nutrition section with a Nutrition Facts label built from its Food-tagged ingredients that are linked to food data. The label's grams per serving come from the food-linked ingredient weight of one batch, divided by Qty in Batch, divided by Servings per batch unit. It updates as you change ingredients, Batch Unit, Qty in Batch, or the serving fields below.

For example, a cracker recipe that makes 12 bags with a Batch Unit of unit, where each bag holds two servings of 15 crackers: set Servings per unit to 2 and Serving size to 15 crackers. The label then reads "2 servings per container" and "Serving size 15 crackers (30g)" instead of treating a whole bag as one serving. A count that is not a whole number, like 2.5, prints as "About 2.5 servings per container".

Recipe Costing

The recipe detail view shows the total cost of all ingredients, equipment usage, and labor. As your ingredient purchase prices change, recipe costs update automatically. Use this to set selling prices with your desired profit margin. Ingredient costs use your weighted-average cost per unit — see how costing works for the full chain from purchase to sale.

Printing a Recipe

Print Recipe in a recipe's ⋯ menu produces a recipe PDF. When the recipe makes an item whose product type is Food, or a subassembly that goes into one, and any ingredient in it — including those inside subassemblies — has allergens not set, a Check allergens before printing dialog lists them first, each linking to the item, with suggestions drawn from the ingredient names. Print recipe unlocks once you tick I've checked these — print anyway, which is recorded in the audit trail. A missing suggestion does not mean an ingredient is allergen-free. The check works the same way as the one on cottage food labels.

The PDF's Contains Allergens box lists the allergens set on the recipe's ingredients and on the item it makes; for a Food item, or a subassembly used in one, it also includes allergens set deeper in the recipe, such as on the ingredients inside a subassembly (each by its current recipe). Allergens are listed in the order of the federal major food allergens, with the same names as the cottage food label (for example, "Tree Nuts").

Allergens on packaging, labor, equipment, MRO (maintenance, repair, and operations) or service lines are never dropped silently. Those lines still appear in the ingredient list, but their allergens are never printed in the box, just as on a cottage food label. If one of the recipe's lines carries an allergen, the box names the item and says why it is left out, so an allergen typed on it by mistake, or a food item filed under the wrong category, is easy to spot and fix. For a Food item, or a subassembly used in one, the box also names such lines deeper in the recipe, and any such item that has a recipe of its own, since nothing inside that recipe is checked.

Packaging, labor, equipment, MRO or service lines can also hold up printing. When an allergen set only on one of those lines is not declared anywhere else on a Food item, the check before printing names the line and asks you to confirm it first; if some ingredients have allergens not set as well, the confirmation reads I've checked these ingredients and the skipped allergens — print anyway.

If a recipe is too large to check every sub-recipe, the check before printing says the printed allergen list may be incomplete and also says "Check the allergens of the deeper sub-recipes by hand before printing." Once you tick the confirmation, Print recipe unlocks (the confirmation reads I've checked the allergens — print anyway when no ingredient is listed). The PDF then always includes the allergen box, even when no allergens were found, marked May be incomplete, so the card never reads as allergen-free.

Production Run Fields

Batch Tracking

Each production run is assigned a batch number (auto-generated as PRD-YYMMDD-XXXX). Individual ingredients can also carry their own batch/lot numbers for traceability. This chain of batch numbers enables full forward and backward traceability in the Traceability Report.

Each ingredient's Batch/Lot picker lists your newest purchases of that item. To link an older purchase, type at least 2 characters of its batch number, vendor or purchase date (as 2025-03-14): the picker searches all your purchases of the item and adds the matches to the list. Then pick the purchase to link it. When more purchases match than the picker can show, it lists the newest and asks you to type more to narrow the search.

To record a batch number with no purchase behind it, type it and pick Use "…" as the batch number at the top of the list (or press Enter); text you leave in the box without picking anything is kept as the batch number too. The ingredient then shows Not linked to a purchase: the batch number is saved for your records, but its cost and traceability won't follow a purchase. Pick a purchase from the list to link it instead. If a purchase already has the batch number you typed, the picker says so: pick that purchase to link it.

Ingredient Verification & Scaling

A production run copies its ingredients, equipment, and steps from the source recipe and checks current stock against the scaled quantities — ingredients you don't have enough of are flagged with an Insufficient quantity warning. Being short doesn't stop you saving: keep the status on Scheduled or In Progress and the run is stored as a plan you can come back to once you've restocked. Only Completed requires the stock to be there, because that's the point inventory actually moves. Use Batch Quantity to run the recipe multiple times and Recipe Scale to resize a single batch; ingredient consumption scales by both.

Below the batch fields, a line shows exactly how much the run will add — for example "This run will add 70 unit to Lavender Soap". Qty in Batch is what one batch yields; Batch Quantity is how many batches. The two are multiplied, so a yield of 1 run 70 times adds 70, while a yield of 0.5 run 70 times adds 35. If you re-point the run at an item measured differently (units instead of ounces, say), Qty in Batch is cleared rather than carried across, and a note asks you to re-enter it in the new unit.

Status Workflow

Production runs progress through: Scheduled (planned, not started), In Progress (actively producing), Completed (finished — inventory is updated), or Canceled. A new run starts as Scheduled with only a Scheduled Date. Moving it to In Progress or Completed fills in the Initiation Date with today, and Completed fills in the Completion Date the same way; change either if it happened on another day. Only completed runs deduct ingredient quantities and add the produced item to inventory.

Production transactions are automatically created when production runs are completed. They record the cost of materials consumed, the quantity produced, and link back to the source recipe and batch number. These transactions feed into your Cost of Goods Sold calculations in financial reports.

The transaction detail shows all consumed ingredients with their quantities and costs, the total production cost, and the resulting cost per unit of the finished product. The output's cost is the rolled-up ingredient and labor cost at your current weighted averages — see how costing works.

A product or service marked Made to order gets its production transactions from its sales instead: each sale saved as Completed makes the item from its recipe, and the production links back to that sale — see Made to Order.