Introduction to Recipes

What are Recipes?

Recipes are reusable lists (or templates) of the materials you use in order to create your product. Recipes are used to calculate your estimated batch manufacture cost and provide pricing guidance for your products. They are not required as materials can be configured directly on manufactures, but can be useful in situations where the same material lists are used to produce products again and again. If you make one-of-a-kind pieces and don't require the pricing guidance feature, you can skip this tutorial and move directly to manufactures.

The best way to explain how Recipes work is to use a simple example.

To track this in Craftybase, what we will be doing is adding each of the ingredients above into the system as a Material, and then we will link these Materials along with the quantity used to the Recipe.

Navigating to the Add Recipe form

To create the Recipe, we will be assuming that my Lavender Soap product already exists, so the first thing to do is to navigate to the Add Recipe page.

1a. You'll find this page by firstly navigating to your product page and then clicking on the + button - this should appear next to the heading called "Recipe"

2a. On the form that appears, you'll firstly see a field for adding a Name for the Recipe - this is optional as it will automatically use the name of the product if you leave it blank.

2b. The next field, Notes is for any descriptions or instructions you wish to store about your recipe.

Manufacture Information

The next section on the form is for configuring details about the manufacturing of this product.

3a. The Manufacture Batch Quantity is for setting how many sellable products you make from the Recipe.

3b. The other box in this section is Estimated Batch Manufacture Time. If you wish to factor in your labor costs in the total manufacture costs for this product, then this is where you do so - this is entirely optional. Your labor cost is calculated by multiplying this time by your the base hourly rate that you will have set when you first created your account - if you missed setting this or wish to change it, you can do so over on your account settings pages. Total labor costs for your batch will be shown on your product page and will also be used in the pricing guidance section - which will be explained in detail later in this tutorial.

Materials

Scrolling down, this next section is for linking the Materials you use to create your Recipe. This is an amazingly powerful part of Craftybase: this linkage not only allows you to see your material costs for the product, but tells the system exactly how much of each material you wish to decrease your stock on hand by whenever you manufacture your product.

4a. Adding an existing Material is easy: after clicking on the Add Material button, just type the first couple of characters of your material name in the search box. The system will then search your lists and return you a set of results to choose from. Choose the one you are after - you'll notice that this will change the form a little: you'll now see the material's quantity type appear next to the quantity box and the Save Material button will appear.

If you don't yet have this Material in your list, you can add it on this form without leaving the page. Instead of typing into the search box in the steps above, click the Add New link that appears to the right of the search box. This will take you to a form where you can enter the new material's details, then return to the Add Material step.

When you have linked all materials to your recipe, click the Save Recipe button to create the Recipe and return to your product page.

Deciphering your Batch Recipe

You'll now see your recipe appear on your product page - there are a couple of things of interest to note here, so let's take a closer look.

You'll see at the top, just under the Recipe heading, the quantity that this recipe makes per batch. If you need to change this you can do at any point by editing the recipe and changing the batch size.

Next, you'll see all the materials we have just added to our recipe. Each of your materials will display the name, the quantity used in the recipe and their current stock levels - this is handy to see if it is currently possible to manufacture a batch from the ingredients you currently have on hand.

Further along in the next column is your Materials Cost. This is the total cost for each material in your recipe, using your current average unit price for the material record.

The next column is your Labor Cost. You'll notice that for all of your materials this will be blank. Component Materials have a labor component which displays here which is not covered in this tutorial.

The total cost is the Material Cost + Labor Cost, so for all of the materials in this example this will be exactly the same as your Material Cost column.

If you have configured a labor rate for the recipe, you'll see your labor totals appear in the labor row.

The very last row of your recipe table is the grand totals for your recipe. This is where you can find your total materials cost, total labor cost and finally your total production cost for the batch.

Your total production cost is the total amount it costs you to manufacture 1 batch of this product.

Pricing Guidance

A little further down the page is your Pricing Guidance area. The finer details of configuring your pricing guidance is covered in a different tutorial, so we'll just concentrate on how your recipe factors into this section for now.

Your pricing guidance uses your Recipe's Total Manufacture Cost and your product Sales Quantity in order to calculate the Cost Price for your product. Your Cost Price is your base cost for producing a single sales quantity of your product before any profit margins are added.

Have some questions?

If you have any additional questions, please get in touch and we'll be happy to give you a hand. Alternatively, feel free to join and post your question in our official Craftybase Facebook group.