How to Add Ingredient Inventory
Learn how to add a raw material ingredient to your inventory in Ardent Seller — the building block for recipe costing and accurate stock counts. This tutorial walks you through creating a new ingredient, choosing the right tracking unit, setting a bin location, reviewing the auto-generated SKU, configuring replenish thresholds, entering your opening stock quantity and cost, and saving.
Transcript
Full narration from the video, broken down by section.
Welcome
Accurate recipe costs and tight inventory counts start in one place — with clean ingredient records. Today we're adding a raw material ingredient to Ardent Seller, complete with a tracking unit, a starting stock count, and a cost per unit, so every batch you produce after this costs itself out automatically.
Open the Ingredients Page
In the sidebar, open the Source section and click Ingredients. This is where every raw material you use in your recipes belongs — from soap oils and waxes to spices and flour. Once the page loads, head up to the top right and click Add Ingredient.
Category, Name, and Tags
The Create Ingredient panel slides open on the right. Before we fill anything in, notice the Category selector at the top. Ingredients come in two flavors: Raw Material, for non-edible inputs like waxes, oils, and scents, and Food Ingredient, which unlocks extra fields for nutrition facts and allergens so the data flows straight through to labels and compliance reports. We're setting up a raw material today, so we'll leave it there. Let's name this one Eucalyptus Essential Oil, and add a short description. Below that you'll find Tags — your own colour-coded labels for grouping inventory later. Click Add tags to search the tags already on your account, or type a new one and create it right there.
Pick a Tracking Unit and Bin Location
Next up is the tracking unit — the unit Ardent Seller uses to track your stock on hand and show it in reports. You can still buy this ingredient in completely different units on your purchase orders, and use it in different units inside your recipes — Ardent Seller converts between them automatically. So pick whatever's most natural to think in. For our liquid oil, we'll go with fluid ounce. And right below that, set a bin location — Shelf A2 — so anyone on your team knows exactly where to find it.
Check the SKU
Keep scrolling and the next section is SKU and Identifiers. One quick note as we work down this panel: depending on when you signed up, some of these sections may start folded — click any section header to open it. Ardent Seller has already generated a unique skew for this ingredient, pulled from the category prefix, so you never have to invent one. Click the sparkle icon to regenerate it using both the category and the name, or just type over it with your own format. We'll keep the auto-generated one.
Enter Opening Stock
Now the most important part — your opening stock, in the Initial Values section. We'll tell Ardent Seller we already have sixteen fluid ounces of this oil on hand, and that it cost us nine dollars per ounce from our last purchase. That becomes the starting cost basis — and every time you log another purchase at a different price, Ardent Seller blends it into a rolling weighted-average cost, so your recipe costs stay accurate without any manual math.
Set Replenish and Reordering
Right below that is Replenish and Reordering. The first two fields let Ardent Seller flag this ingredient the moment you're running low. Replenish Point is the floor you never want to drop below — we'll set that to eight ounces. Replenish Quantity is how much you typically reorder — we'll go with thirty-two. Further down the same section you can name a default vendor and their lead time, so restock planning knows who to buy from and how far ahead to warn you.
Review and Save
Scroll to the bottom and you'll pass Attributes and Custom Fields — both optional, and both there when you want your own structured data on an item. Last of all, confirm the state is set to Active so it shows up in your recipe ingredient picker right away. Everything looks good — click Create Ingredient.
Wrap Up
And there it is — Eucalyptus Essential Oil is now in your ingredients list, with a tracked quantity and a known cost. You can open it anytime to log a purchase, adjust stock, or link it into a recipe. That's all it takes to add an ingredient in Ardent Seller. If this helped, hit like and subscribe for more quick tutorials.