Recipes and production runs
You’ll need: Recipes, Production runs, Inventory transactions — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.
If you transform what you buy before you sell it — baking, milling, assembling, packing, brewing — then raw materials and finished goods are different items, and something has to convert one into the other honestly.
A recipe describes the transformation
A recipe has a name, an SKU, a description, its inputs and its outputs.
It is a statement of what it takes to make what. It moves no stock by itself — it is the formula, not the act.
Outputs is plural on purpose. One process can yield more than one thing, which is how joint products and by-products are described rather than fudged into a single line.
A production run performs it
A production run is the act, and it is recorded as an inventory transaction. It consumes the inputs and produces the outputs, in one operation, so both sides of your stock move together and neither can be forgotten.
The transaction records the recipe used and how many batches were made, plus the output’s lot reference, expiry and origin where the item is lot tracked. Production cost captures what the run cost you.
Why one operation and not two
You could record a wastage of flour and a delivery of bread, and your quantities would end up roughly right.
What you would lose is the connection. There would be no record that this flour became that bread, so no traceability from output back to input, no basis for a cost per unit, and no way to answer a recall. Two entries that happen to balance are not the same as one operation that describes what occurred.
Yield is information
The run records what you actually got, not what the recipe predicts. Where they differ, that difference is worth attention — a consistently short yield means the recipe is wrong, the process is losing material, or something is going out of the back door.
Recording the honest number is what makes that visible. Recording the expected number because it is tidier destroys the only signal you had.
Try it
On staging.feeprime.com, build a recipe with two inputs and one output, run it, and watch three stock figures move in one action. Then run it again with a deliberately short output and see the difference the yield reveals.