Co-packed products

Some weeks you make the sauce yourself; some weeks a co-packer makes it to your recipe and delivers the jars finished. It is still your product, with your recipe, your formats and your label. In BatchDash it is one product whose stock comes from two places: your batches and the co-packer’s deliveries.

This module is part of the larger plans.

Add the co-packer’s price

Open the product’s page, open More actions and click Add vendor pricing. The Vendor pricing card appears with the co-packer’s first price, in the product’s own unit: what they charge for a case of 12 jars, for instance. From then on the product can be bought: it shows up on purchase order lines, on the vendor’s page and in Buying, like a product you buy ready-made.

You create it as a product you make: on New product, “I make it” is the right answer when a co-packer makes your recipe. Only the vendor price says it can be bought too.

The recipe itself can wait. Tick No recipe yet on New product and add the co-packer’s price: until the recipe has its first ingredient line here, the product is checked like one you buy. Check an order takes the shelf first, then puts the rest on To buy at their price, and the lots card reads Lots. See a product before its recipe.

Batches and deliveries side by side

The lots card becomes Batches and deliveries: your batches and the co-packer’s deliveries in one list, each lot saying where it came from. A delivered lot links to the order it came on; a batch links to its run. Selling, counting and the trace treat both the same way, and a recall reaches every customer whichever way the lot was made.

One cost, the jar counted once

The product’s unit cost is the average of everything that came in: your batches at what they cost to make, and the co-packer’s deliveries at their landed cost, fees and currency included. A delivered jar arrives already packed, while the product page adds your packaging on top of the average for what you make. So a delivery keeps its packaging share out of the average when it is booked, and the jar, lid and label are counted once.

Buying and planning

Buying suggests the product below its restock level and counts what is already coming: open order lines, and the batches you have planned into its format. When a replenishment rule plans batches of it too, the Buying line says so, so you decide which one fills the gap. Until its recipe has an ingredient line, the product’s Replenishment card holds the other kind of rule, the one that prepares the co-packer’s order as a draft (automatic draft orders).

Stop buying it

Mark the product No longer supplied on the co-packer’s vendor page. The product stays what it always was, a product you make, and its delivered lots keep their history.