This guide covers how to get started with stock tracking and inventory management. There’s no one size fits all approach: you can do all of this before you've unboxed your hardware or grab a spare device and get this set up mid-service.
It starts by logging into my.kounta.com from any device that has the internet.
Top tip: Alcohol per measurement is one of the most costly items you store and the most likely thing to go walkabout! 👀 If you’re time-poor, a great place to start is tracking your booze and scale from there. Don’t sell alcohol? Meat, Cheese or Packaging are also great categories to start with.
Before You Begin
- Any POS plan
- Purchase LITE or Advanced plan
- Produce LITE, Advanced, or Advanced Recipes plan
- A recipe card for a product you sell (this can be in your head!)
- Price and measure for a product you buy
- Recommended: Stock Count feature enabled
Note - LITE plans are $0 and can be enabled from your Subscriptions page.
Purchasing products through Lightspeed
Estimated time to complete: 8 minutes
You’ll first open Back Office to configure the products, later you’ll jump into Purchase to start purchasing.
- Add a product that you buy
From Products, hit Add New Product. Give your product a name* and select the tax. As POS category is not a required field and you aren’t selling this product you can leave it blank. Price is a mandatory field but as you don’t sell it, you can set the Sell price as $0.
*To set yourself up for success, give your product a descriptive name using the following naming convention: Name - Size Container. e.g. Newy Signature Gin - 700ml Btl.
2. Set up product info
Hit Save and edit product, or the settings cogwheel to the right of the product. You’ll then be taken to the product info. Under Measured, choose how it’s measured. For liquids, it’s usually by Volume, solids by Weight.
Add the default size, e.g. 700ml. If you’ve used the recommended naming convention you can match to that. Double-check your logic by reading the phrase under the Measured amount.
Scroll down to enter in the Cost Price, e.g $70. Then, along the top, hit Accounting. By default I Buy- I Sell- and I Stock this item are switched On. As you do not sell this item, switch Off I Sell this Item. Hit Save et voila you have set up a product that you buy!
3. Add a Supplier
Go to People, then along the top choose Suppliers, and hit Add a new Supplier. Fill in the company name and email address, and save.
If you’d like to do some testing to see what a Purchase Order looks like before you send it, you can put your own details in to add yourself as a Supplier.
4. Assign product to supplier
Go to Products, then choose Suppliers. Find the product you added and from the drop-down under Default Supplier select the Supplier.
5. Create and receive a purchase order
Now you’re ready to purchase the product via Lightspeed and start getting tangible purchase data. Step by step guide: Sending purchase orders & receiving stock deliveries.
Once you’ve marked the Purchase Order as Received, if you perform a Stock Count, you will see that the product you purchased has upticked by the amount that was purchased.
Using Produce to automate stock tracking
Estimated time to complete: 5 minutes
You can add stock to your Inventory by marking Purchase Orders as Received, or manually adding Counted Quantity in a stock count. And, now you want to start decrementing from your stock to give yourself accurate stock tracking.
Let’s head to the kitchen or behind the bar (metaphorically) in Lightspeed! You’ll want to have Back Office and Produce open.
- Add a product that you stock
Jump to the previous section, Add a product that you buy to recap how to do this!
2. Add a product that you sell
From Products, hit Add New Product, enter a name, POS Category and Sell Price. You may be a dab hand at this already!
3. Build Recipe
Now that you have a product you stock and a product you sell, you can use Produce to link them together and have one decrement from the other. Navigate to Produce, hit Create a recipe and choose the product that you sell.
Under Ingredients, start typing to search from your existing products, click on the product you buy as it appears from the dropdown list. Enter in the amount/measure you want to decrement from it and hit Save recipe.
Note: If you sell the product through POS and perform a stock count, you will see that the product you purchased has decreased by the percentage ratio amount that was sold.
What's my next step?
Add items in bulk
Ready to launch into hyperspeed? Grab a purchase order and start adding your products in bulk using a CSV upload. Adding & editing menu items in bulk - with .CSV
Top tip: Use Tags to note the Supplier for each product. Once uploaded, use that tag to bulk assign a Supplier to products.
Wastage
You can automatically update your stock count every time you record waste. In time you can get the holistic data you need to drive your own action plan to reduce wastage.
Frequently Asked Questions
If I buy products, like beer cans or wine bottles in carton, boxes, crates etc. How do I set this up?
For products that you sell as they come, you can head to the Inventory tab from the Product info to input how the item is purchased.