How to Create Your First Recipe
Learn how to build a recipe in Ardent Seller — so the app can auto-cost every batch, track ingredient usage, and drive your production runs. This tutorial walks you through creating a recipe from scratch: naming it, pointing it at a finished product, adding ingredients with quantities and units, writing step-by-step instructions, and saving.
Transcript
Full narration from the video, broken down by section.
Welcome
Ever wondered exactly what each batch of your product costs you to make? That's what a recipe in Ardent Seller gives you — a living, auto-costed blueprint you can scale up, run production from, and keep refining. Let's build one together.
Navigate to Recipes
In the sidebar, open the Create section — that's where your recipes and production runs live. Click Recipes to see the ones already set up. To start a new one, click Add Recipe in the top right.
Name the Recipe
The Create Recipe panel slides open on the right. Start by giving your recipe a clear, descriptive name — if you run several variations, include something distinctive like the batch size or scent so you can find it later. Let's call this one Lavender Soy Candle Small Batch. Then add a short description so anyone on your team knows at a glance what it produces.
Set the Target and Batch Size
Next, tell Ardent Seller what this recipe actually produces. Recipes can target a Finished Good — the raw output of production, like the candle itself — or a Product, which is the packaged, ready-to-sell version. A typical workflow has one recipe that manufactures the finished good, and a second assembly recipe that packages it into a product. We're making the finished good first, so click the Target Inventory field and pick Lavender Soy Candle. Set your batch unit, then enter how much one run yields — we'll make twelve candles per batch.
Add Ingredients
Now the heart of the recipe — the ingredients. Scroll down to the Ingredients section and click Add Ingredient. A lavender soy candle needs two ingredients — your soy wax base and your lavender essential oil. For each one, start typing the name in the search box, click the match from the list, enter the quantity you need per batch, and choose the unit of measure. As soon as you fill in a line, Ardent Seller pulls the ingredient's current cost and on-hand quantity from your inventory, so you see the line cost and total batch cost update live — and get a warning if you're short. You can drag the handle on the left to reorder the ingredients however you'd like.
Add Equipment
Just above the steps, the Equipment section lets you list the tools a batch needs. This part's optional, but there's a real payoff — every time you run the recipe, Ardent Seller can log usage hours against each piece of equipment, flag upcoming maintenance, and help you plan replacements before something breaks mid-batch. Our candles need a Wax Melter, so click Add Equipment and select it from the list.
Add Steps
Below the equipment, the Steps section is where you write out your method. Click Add Step and type a short instruction — like Melt soy wax in wax melter to one-eighty-five degrees Fahrenheit. Enter a duration — fifteen minutes for this step — so Ardent Seller can tally your total batch time. If you have a labor rate set up, link it here too, and each step will roll its own labor cost into the batch. Add another step for cooling the wax, adding the lavender oil, and pouring the candles. You'll see Total Duration and Total Labor Cost tiles appear at the bottom as you go — giving you a realistic picture of what a batch truly costs to produce, not just the raw materials.
Check the Batch Cost
Before you save, take a second to review your numbers. Ardent Seller tallies up a Total Ingredient Cost panel right below the ingredients, a Total Labor Cost panel under the steps, and — at the very bottom of the sheet — a combined Total Cost summary that rolls them together. This is what a single batch actually costs to produce, and it's the number that drives your pricing, your margins, and your production decisions.
Review and Save
When everything looks right, scroll all the way to the bottom of the panel, take one last look at your total cost, and click Create Recipe. Ardent Seller validates your inputs, saves the recipe, and drops you back on the list. If any required field's missing, the button stays disabled until you fill it in — so you always know the recipe is complete before it saves.
Wrap Up
And that's it — your new recipe is saved and ready to power production runs, cost analyses, and price-list updates. From here you can duplicate it to spin up a variation, or kick off a production run with one click from the actions menu — where you can scale the batch up or down, and Ardent Seller will automatically deduct the ingredients from inventory and add the finished goods. If this tutorial helped, give us a like and subscribe for more Ardent Seller walkthroughs. See you in the next one.