Suppliers, product mapping and price alerts

Suppliers

Under Procurement → Suppliers, each supplier needs at minimum a name. Add the email and purchase orders can be sent from Servora; add payment terms and invoices calculate their own due dates.

Suppliers can also be given portal access — their own login where they see the orders you have sent them and can confirm deliveries. That is optional and off by default.

Product mapping

Your supplier calls it "CHKN THIGH B/L 10KG CTN". You call it "Chicken thigh, boneless". Product Mapping is where you tell Servora those are the same thing, once. After that, every scanned invoice and imported price list from that supplier matches automatically.

Mapping is per supplier, because two suppliers use two different codes for the same item — and that is the whole reason the problem exists.

Form templates

A form template is a saved order sheet for one supplier: the twenty things you buy from them every week, in the order you walk the store. Ordering becomes filling in quantities rather than searching for items.

Price alerts

Set a threshold under Settings → Procurement — say 10%. When a delivery is received at a unit price more than that above the last one, Servora raises a price alert. Alerts appear on the dashboard and under Price Alerts.

An alert is not a block. The delivery is received and the cost updates either way — the alert exists so that somebody notices before the month-end report tells them.

Set the threshold to something you will actually act on. At 2% you will get an alert every week and stop reading them; at 25% you will only hear about disasters.

Price history

Every cost change is recorded with its date, the old price, the new price and who or what caused it — a delivery, an imported price list, or a manual edit. Open any ingredient and look at its history, or run the Price history report across the whole list.