thread Re: Entering Raw Material into Inventory in Orders, Menu Items, Catalog & Fulfilment

Entering Raw Material into Inventory

LittleGreekGirl — Sat, 20 Sep 2025 10:06:14 GMT

I make wreaths, arrangements, etc. My question is how am I supposed to inventory/track my raw materials & their costs that I use to make in my finished products that I sell through Square? I do not make multiples of the same design.

Is Square Retail Inventory not built for manufacturing inventory?

Re: Entering Raw Material into Inventory

TheRealChipA — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 11:25:28 GMT

Hey @LittleGreekGirl. At this time Square inventory doesn’t work well for things like manufacturing or even for restaurants/bars with different recipes, etc. You’ll need to head over to the Square App Marketplace and look for third-party apps that work for this purpose.

I use Restoke which is built specifically for the food/beverage industry, but even this integration could work in a manufacturing scenario like yours. In fact, I could see how one could adapt any restaurant/bar inventory app to work for any business model that uses raw materials to make a unique finished product. Another would be Thrive Inventory.

Keep in mind that if you want to automatically track this kind of inventory and costing, this capability will come with a monthly subscription fee. This is because this kind of inventory tracking is highly complex and has lots of moving parts. Square is beginning to dip their toes in these waters with restaurants/bars, but what they have for beta testing right now is pretty basic so far.

You might also want to check around (in online blogs, local business groups, etc) for suggestions about how others in your industry handle this. They might know of software that does not specifically integrate with Square but would still do what you want to help you cost out your unique products. Of course, you could also do this on your own with a spreadsheet, but even that is not as easy as it might sound. I’ve done that before and it took a lot of my time.

I can answer any more specific questions you might have, but this is an overview about next steps for now. I hope it helps.

Re: Entering Raw Material into Inventory

DinaLRosenberg — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 12:48:45 GMT

This is a great suggestion Chip.. we also make things but we currently don't track it at all- we DO figure out our cost of materials per item to figure out the retail cost, but there is no inventory tracking of materials..

We really do hope that Square improves their inventory tracking because even for straight retail it has severe limitations.

Re: Entering Raw Material into Inventory

TheRealChipA — Wed, 31 Jul 2024 14:17:31 GMT

Dina,

Honestly, I believe that you’d find a lot of use for Restoke as long as you can ignore the obvious food/beverage references and replace them with similar terms for your component inventory. It integrates with your Square account and you can create “recipes” for each item in your item library, tracking SRPs and inventory. It even can import invoices to automatically update your component inventory. And it can track substitutions, additions, etc, via modifier selections with modifier “recipes.”

It’s not for the faint of heart, though. It took me two months to get things set up so that I can now use it daily. And, I’m still learning all the things that it offers! But, now that my setup is workable, I have turned on live inventory and costing. Every day I can see how much inventory I have on hand, what items need to possibly be ordered, and best of all I can see any cost issues before they become a problem. Like I said, it costs money. For me, it is going to be $109/month (annual billing) because I use all of the bells and whistles. But considering how many hours I reclaimed not having to manually do inventory and costing, it is money well spent, trust me. After all, my time is worth something, a fact I usually minimize. But I’m learning to put a worth on my time as much as I do on everyone else’s.

Anyway, if you want to give it a go, they have a free trial. And the link in my signature line has an offer for more savings of an extra free month beyond their standard 14-day trial. Also, for the record, I would definitely be available to work offline to help you set things up and to give you the benefit of my errors and missteps as I was setting things up. This is a highly complicated venture, but after the initial setup pain the benefits are incredible.

As for Square doing this, I believe it is on their radar. They have an Ingredient Cost Beta that gives me that idea, anyway. But this is just the first baby step in what will be a long process. Like I said, this functionality (whether food/beverage or manufacturing) is complex and server-resource intensive. And it requires a lot of server storage. Even IF Square does get here, it will be a multi-year process AND it will have to come with monthly subscriptions to offset their costs for computing and storage. No one can do this for free, trust me. Honestly, I personally think Square would be better off acquiring some company that already does this well and integrating that into their ecosystem. But that’s just my opinion. Ha.

Re: Entering Raw Material into Inventory

jdotson — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 23:00:52 GMT

This is very interesting.

We are doing photofinishing (remember that?) and are also looking to integrate labor costs. What's your experience with Restoke (or some other tool) handling that?

Thanks!

Re: Entering Raw Material into Inventory

TheRealChipA — Sat, 03 Aug 2024 23:24:20 GMT

@jdotsonObviously I have no experience, per se, with something like this. However, IF your labor costs are able to be defined then I can’t see why you couldn’t redefine a supply item to be labor cost, instead. As long as your labor costs were simple fixed costs that apply to all finished products I can’t see why this wouldn’t work.

I’m assuming that in your business you’d want to track inventory of other things like chemicals, paper, etc, as well as packaging materials. If that is the case, then using a tool like Restoke (or a competitor) is definitely something that could be tweaked to your particular business. In my case, I have a couple of things that I want included in my costing that are NOT supplies. For example, I want to recoup the cost of card processing so I build that into my prices as if it were a supply needed for each item.

The bigger question in your case would be — do you need something that complicated? By that I mean do your finished products have lots of variables (modifiers) that affect the price and cost? Is your inventory as complicated and intricate as it is for F&B operations? Restoke, etc, are great tools but they are not cheap tools. Only you can decide if you need something as intricate as this sort of tool.

But, yes, I see no reason why a tool like that couldn’t do what you want. After any item that affects our final price is just that — a variable to take into account with arriving at that price. It doesn’t matter if those items are physical or not, really.