How to track household goods

Napkins, paper towels, trash bags, cleaning products, and even toilet paper — these items are just as essential to running a location as the ingredients you cook with. They affect the guest experience and daily operations, cost a significant amount of money, and deserve proper tracking.

This article explains how to track household supplies and disposable consumables, and helps you avoid running out of essentials unexpectedly.

Add consumables to the menu

Add all consumables as ingredients. This way you can receive them into storage and track them separately from dishes at the POS.

💡 Poster has no limit on the number of ingredients — unlike products or dishes, where the limit depends on your plan.

Some consumables should be added directly to dish ingredients. For example, in a to-go café where all drinks are served in disposable cups, add the cup and lid of the appropriate size alongside the coffee and milk. For a to-go pizzeria — add the cardboard box and napkins. For a wok restaurant — the cardboard box, chopsticks, and bag.

📖 How to add ingredients

To make it easier to check balances and run inventory checks for consumables, create ingredient categories for them. Use the category filter to check the balances of an entire category in storage, or select a category to run a partial inventory check for that group only.

📖 How to add ingredient categories

Add consumables to dishes

If packaging is always required, add it as an ingredient in the recipe. If packaging varies, for example, different bottle or box sizes — create modifiers linked to the packaging ingredients.

Use recipe modifiers to add all required consumables to dish ingredients. For example, for a takeaway order: a container, bag, disposable cutlery, and napkins.

Group them into semi-finished items and create a modifier set to easily add it to selected recipes later.

☝️ Recipe modifiers are available on the Business and Pro plans only.

To offer packaging options through modifiers:

1. Go to Menu → Dishes → Modifiers → Add set.
2. Name the set "Packaging" and select Only one.
3. Add options, for example, "S box" and "XL box"  and link each to the corresponding semi-finished item or packaging ingredient with the required quantity.
4. Add the set to the relevant dishes.
5. Sell a dish with different packaging options and check the packaging ingredient deductions in Storage → Ingredient movement report.

Modifiers don't change the base recipe cost price, the cost only increases if packaging is added directly as an ingredient.

💡 You can also use modifiers for dish variations, for example, "no sugar", "no pepper", "no ice / with ice".

📖 How to add recipe modifiers

Create a separate storage location for household supplies

Keep packaging and supplies as a separate ingredient group and monitor minimum stock levels.

On the Mini, Business, and Pro plans, you can add an unlimited number of storage locations. You can create a dedicated storage for all consumables, or organize them by purpose — for example, one storage for household needs and another for packaging and serving materials.

💡 Organizing storage locations by purpose or supplier significantly simplifies inventory checks, reporting, and purchase planning. In just a few steps you can create an inventory sheet for all plastic lunch boxes or track their usage in the ingredients movement report.

📖 How to add a storage location 📖 How to configure stock deductions from different storage locations

Track expenses and create stock deductions

Some household supplies can be added directly to the dish, when a dish or drink is sold, they're deducted automatically.

For other consumables soap, hand sanitizer, floor cleaning cloths you'll need to create manual stock deductions and run inventory checks after adding them to the system. The best time to do this is before placing a purchase order, so you can see current balances and order exactly what's needed.

📖 How to run an inventory check 📖 How to create a manual stock deduction