Made to Order

Made to order is a setting on saved products and services, and it needs a recipe that makes the item first.

1. Write a recipe whose output is the item, under Create → Recipes in the sidebar (see Recipes in the Create guide): one blank tee, a sheet of transfer paper, ten minutes of pressing.
2. Open the product and choose Edit.
3. Turn on Made to order.
4. Pick the recipe. Only active recipes at this location that make this item are offered; with just one, it is picked for you.
5. Save the product.

A product with variants uses one recipe for all of them, unless a variant has an active recipe of its own (a recipe whose output is that variant): then a sale of that variant is made from its own recipe. The item made is always the variant sold.

A custom tee you press yourself after each order, from start to first sale:

1. Write the recipe. Its output is the shirt (or one size or colour variant of it), with a batch of 1 each, in the unit you sell it in. Its ingredients are the blank tee, the transfer and anything else one shirt uses.
2. Give each blank a cost. If you have blanks on hand, enter how many and what you paid when you add them. If you don't, record your next blank purchase before your first made-to-order sale. The cost is remembered after the blank is used up.
3. Turn on Made to order on the shirt and pick the recipe.
4. Sell. Save the sale as Completed, by hand or from your store: the shirt is made, the blank is used up and the sale carries its cost.

While you add a made-to-order item to a sale, its line says so: "Made to order: we'll make this from recipe name when you save this sale as Completed." When the sale is saved as Completed, Ardent Seller posts a production for each recipe the sale uses: a consumption that uses up the recipe's ingredients, scaled to the quantity sold, and a manufacture or assembly that adds exactly the quantity sold of the item. The sale then takes it straight back out.

It works the same for every way a sale arrives: entered by hand, the Record Sale and Market Day workflows, duplicating a sale, a bulk status change to Completed, a CSV or AI sales import, and sales synced from Etsy, Shopify or Square. The productions appear in Production Transactions, marked Made to order, and each one links back to its sale; the sale lists them too, one entry per recipe with its cost of goods. Productions made for a sale don't count toward your plan's monthly transaction allowance.

The ingredients are used up even when you hold none, so an ingredient can go below zero: that is the order waiting for the blank, jar or other material you buy for it. Record the purchase when you buy it and its stock comes back to zero. You don't need a lot or batch number for any of it.

An ingredient at zero or below keeps the average cost of what you have bought before, so the sale is costed at your usual price for it. An ingredient you have never bought has no cost yet, so its first sale records none for it. Before you start selling, record a purchase of each ingredient, or enter what you actually have on hand with its cost when you add it. Don't enter an opening quantity you don't have just to set a cost: your count would stay off by that amount.

• Edit a completed sale's made-to-order lines (add or remove one, or change its item, variant, quantity or unit): its productions are re-made to match. Any other edit (a price, a note, an ordinary line) leaves the productions and their costs alone.
• Move it back to Initiated, In Progress or Canceled: its productions are removed, returning the ingredients to stock, and made again if you complete it later.
• Return it: the made items stay in stock, as with any return.
• Delete it: its productions are deleted with it, returning the ingredients to stock.

A production made for a sale can't be edited or deleted on its own; change the sale instead. Every change is in the audit trail.

A completed sale that wasn't made (completed before you turned on Made to order, or while a line couldn't be made) isn't made by an unrelated edit. To make it, change its made-to-order line, or set the sale to In Progress, save it, and save it as Completed again. The sale line's note says which applies.

The sale line's cost of goods is the cost of the production that made it, so profit, margins and the income statement see what the item really cost you. On Schedule C, ingredients you buy stay Part III purchases, and stock below zero at the end of a period is valued at its average cost, so an ingredient used before it was bought is counted once, in the period it was used. See How Costing Works.

Most print-on-demand sellers don't print anything themselves: a provider such as Printify, Printful or Gelato prints and ships each order, so there are no blanks to track. Your cost of goods is what the provider charges for each order. Ardent Seller doesn't connect to print providers yet, so their orders and costs aren't imported automatically.

Until it does, Made to order can still give each sale a real cost, as a workaround:

1. Add the provider's printed product as a finished good you buy, one for each base product (for example "Printify Bella 3001 tee, printed"), with the provider as its vendor.
2. Write a recipe whose output is your product and whose one ingredient is that finished good, 1 each.
3. Turn on Made to order on the product and pick the recipe.
4. Record each provider invoice as a purchase of that finished good. Record one before your first sale, so it has a cost.

Each completed sale then uses up one printed product and carries its cost. The count can go below zero between invoices, and the purchase brings it back. The cost is your average provider price for that base product, so it won't follow each order's exact charge, its print areas or the provider's shipping.