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. Here we go.
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 lives — from soap oils and waxes to spices and flour. Once the page loads, head up to the top right and click Add Ingredient to open the create panel.
Fill In Ingredient Details
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 right there. Now let's name this one Eucalyptus Essential Oil. Add a short description so you remember what it is down the road — a steam-distilled eucalyptus oil used in our soap line. And tags help you filter and group ingredients later, so we'll type essential oil, soap, and spa.
Pick a Tracking Unit and Bin Location
Next up is the tracking unit — this is just 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 and production runs — 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 — we'll enter Shelf A2 — so anyone on your team knows exactly where to find it.
Set Replenish Thresholds
While we're here, scroll down to Replenish Settings. These 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 when it's time to restock — we'll go with thirty-two. With those set, the dashboard and reports can warn you before you run out mid-batch.
Check the SKU
Keep scrolling and you'll hit the SKU and Identifiers section. Notice Ardent Seller has already generated a unique SKU for this ingredient — pulled automatically from the category prefix, so you never have to invent one. If you'd rather base it on the name too, click the sparkle icon next to the field to regenerate using both the category and the ingredient 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. Keep scrolling down to 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 of this ingredient at a different price, Ardent Seller automatically blends it into a rolling weighted-average cost, so your recipe costs stay accurate without any manual math.
Review and Save
Scroll down once more and confirm the state is set to Active so it shows up in your recipe ingredient picker right away. Everything looks good — click Create Ingredient, and it's saved.
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. See you in the next one.