Wanting to track your finished products and the raw materials or ingredients used in making them?
Whether using Assemblies, Bundles, or Modifiers, you'll need the raw materials/ingredients as products in Thrive.
The steps below will outline:
The best options for creating ingredients in Thrive
Ways to differentiate and customize your ingredients to make them easy to use.
Step 1: Gather your information
First, you'll need to:
Decide how you want to measure your ingredients when they arrive, such as the size of the container you buy or what you consider "1 unit" of a product.
For example, do you receive eggs by the dozen or cartons of 18 or 24? A single unit of each one can mean very different things.
Have the cost details for each ingredient handy.
Step 2: Choose a method
If products were not already in your sales integration and imported over, two options exist for creating them in Thrive.
1. Create items individually via the "Create product" button on the Products page.
OR
2. Create items in bulk using Bulk Upload Sheets.
The Create Products and Variants sheet has everything you need.
Still unsure? Go ahead and take a look at an example sheet to see what this looks like:
Step 3: Build your strategy
When creating ingredients, whether in bulk or one-by-one, there are a lot of fields to consider, like:
Product Names
Precisely and accurately naming ingredients will save you time (and headaches) in the long run.
When entering products, make sure to have a clear naming structure. This will help later when you are building your catalog!
Include the unit of measurement in the title or variant name. How do you receive your items? Is it in pounds, cups, oz?
It's also helpful to think about how you use your raw materials. Do you receive it in pounds but use it in ounces? It might be helpful to add the conversion in the name as well. Example: All Purpose Flour - 5lbs/80 oz
Optional: Place an indicator in the name. If the item is ONLY used internally, try putting "ING" (for ingredient). That way, no confusion arises as to which to use.
If the product is available for sale on a website or is customer-facing, the product name shows on the integrations.
Pro Tip
Thrive does not automatically recognize standard unit conversion. Our system does not know that 1000 milliliters go into 1 liter or that 16oz is the same as 1lb unless you tell it.
Active or Inactive Status
If the product is not available for purchase, keep it off your sales channels. For example, you don't want the bag of flour on the POS if it's not something you sell.
In the old experience, mark the item inactive on the product detail page, or when creating or editing products using our bulk create tools. In the new experience, turn off the ingredient's sales channels instead — a product counts as active while any sales channel is on. Either way, keep the ingredient enabled at the locations where it is consumed.
Cost
Be sure to add a cost for each item. When you use the raw materials in bundles/assemblies or modifiers, the applicable component costs of the inputs consumed will be automatically totaled together to form COGS for the final product. An assembly can also carry an assembly cost of its own, which is added on top.
Categories
Adding a category for all your back-of-house ingredients can help later with reordering, taking stock, etc. Try using 'Dry Goods', 'Back of House', 'Ingredients', 'Material Goods', etc.!
Vendors
This way, you can easily re-order from your vendors using purchase orders.
Purchase Orders (POs) help you place orders from your vendors. Before placing the PO, select a Vendor and add the products you want to order.
You can create vendors from both the bulk create spreadsheet and the Products page by clicking "Create Product."
Modifying Existing Products
If you already have your ingredients in the Thrive, you can edit existing or add defining characteristics such as a unit of measurement, category, and vendor, or make them inactive via a bulk upload spreadsheet.
Which spreadsheet you'll need to pull will depend on what you want to edit. See our chart below to guide you:
What field(s) you are Editing | Recommended Bulk Edit Sheet |
Product Name (at the product level, not variant level), Categories, Product status | Edit Products Sheet |
Variant Name, Adding a vendor | Edit Variants Sheet |
Product Name, Variant name, Categories, Vendors, and Product status | Requires two sheets. The Edit Variants Sheet, and the Edit Products Sheet |
Feature Specific Insight
Depending on which features you plan to use and build in Thrive, you need to have important insight before you get started.
Assemblies
Take a group of products and turn them into a new product.
Your ingredients/materials are input products.
The final product is the output and is usually the end-sellable product for the customer.
Quantities for input products are deducted only when the assembly is ran.
Your bill of materials = your recipe/raw ingredients
You must know units of measurement for your inputs to accurately run the assembly and have inventory deducted
All inputs will be consumed in the Assembly run
Only available on Professional Plans and above.
Bundles
A product made from existing products. It can also be used to break down products into smaller units.
Components are pulled from inventory at time of sale.
The cost of a Bundle depends on the cost of the components used. Thrive automatically calculates Bundle costs for you.
How precise a component quantity can be depends on which catalog experience you are in. The new experience accepts component quantities with up to 10 decimal places — for example, approximately 0.0833333333 for 1/12. The old editor accepts up to 3. Decimal display preferences are set under Settings › Inventory. See Enhanced Decimal Place Support.
Bundles are not editable at the time of sale. Every component is removed when the Bundle is sold. Need to customize items at checkout? Try combining Bundles and Modifiers (if your integration supports it).
Bundle quantities cannot be edited, as Bundle quantities are defined by their components.
You cannot create a Bundle from another Bundle.
If Convert to Bundle shows an upgrade notice, the bundle editor is not available on your account.
Bundles have limitations on where and how they can be used. Review the Bundle Setup Implications Guide for more information and to help you decide which item to make the bundle and which item to make the component.
Modifiers
Allows customization to products at the POS. Connect modifiers to products so that when a modifier is selected at checkout, the quantities are deducted from inventory.
A mapped ingredient can be inactive (kept off your sales channels, as in Active or Inactive Status above) and still be deducted. Keep it enabled at the selling location(s). Quantity tracking is a separate setting. With it off, Thrive still records the modifier inventory-change entry and can use the mapped variant's default cost at that location for COGS. Remaining stock is not tracked.
No limit exists to how many modifier groups can be mapped to a product.
COGS from mapped ingredients can be recorded even when the base item has no cost. Set costs for both.
Use substitutions when you want to put an amount of an item back into inventory instead of taking it out. Great for menu items that are served one way 95% of the time but are modified the other 5%.
Modifiers are currently supported for Clover & Square integrations