Auto-tracked products
An auto-tracked product gets its stock from your sales, not from a count. Each day that you sold it, Rinvy subtracts the units sold from its stock. Use it for items that you sell one for one, for example bottled soda, canned beer and packaged snacks.
Auto-tracking needs the Standard or Pro plan and a sales feed. The feed is a sales upload or Toast auto-sync. Toast auto-sync reads the Toast Item details report, which lists every menu item ordered in a date range (Toast menu reports).
Turn on auto-tracking
Owners and managers can turn it on. A product must be tracked by quantity. A status-tracked (OK, LOW, OUT) product or a non-inventoried product cannot be auto-tracked.
Go to Products. Add a product, or open one to edit it.
In guided setup, pick Auto-tracked on the tracking step. In the quick form, turn on the Auto-tracked switch.
- Enter the Selling price: what a customer pays for one.
- Optional: enter a Menu category, for example "Drinks".
Enter the Starting count: how many you have on the shelf now. If the product comes in cases, enter full cases and loose units.
- Save the product.
Rinvy creates a menu item for the product, so that your POS sales can match it. The starting count becomes the baseline. The baseline is the count that sales are subtracted from.
The menu item has the same name as the product. A sales line matches it when the two names are the same, ignoring case, or when you confirmed that match on an earlier upload. If your POS says "COKE 20OZ" and the product is "Coca-Cola 20 oz", map the line once on the first upload. Later uploads then match on their own.
The menu item and its hidden one-ingredient recipe count toward your plan limits. On Standard, the limits are 60 menu items and 50 recipes. Pro has no limit. If you turn auto-tracking off and on again, Rinvy reuses the same menu item, so nothing new counts.
Which unit should an auto-tracked product count in?
Count it in the unit that you sell, usually each, because every sale subtracts one counting unit. A soda that you count in cases loses a whole case for each bottle sold. Count the soda in each and set a Case size of 24 instead. The starting count and the recounts then take full cases plus loose bottles.
How stock goes down
After each sales upload or Toast sync, Rinvy does these steps for each auto-tracked product:
- Rinvy finds the product's latest count: the starting count or the latest recount.
- For each business day after that count, Rinvy adds up the units sold. A combo that contains the product counts too.
- Rinvy writes one stock change for each day: the stock before, minus the units sold that day.
Days on or before the latest count do not change the stock. If you upload the same days again, Rinvy recalculates those days. Sales are never subtracted two times.
Deliveries that you receive and waste that you log change the stock, as for any other product. Stock can go below zero. Rinvy does not stop at zero, because a negative number tells you that something left the shelf without a sale, or a delivery was not recorded.
For example, on Monday night after close, you turn on auto-tracking for a 20 oz soda and count 2 cases of 24 plus 6 loose: a starting count of 54. Tuesday's sales are 18 bottles, so the stock is 36. On Wednesday you sell 15 bottles and 3 burger combos that include the soda, so the stock is 18.
When should you recount an auto-tracked product?
Recount at the end of a business day, after the last sale and before midnight in your kitchen's time zone. Rinvy never subtracts the sales of a recount's own day, because the shelf that you counted already shows them. A recount before you open misses the sales of that day, and the stock reads high until the next recount.
Auto-tracked products do not show on the normal count sheet. Recount them from time to time to correct the stock. The IRS sets the same rule for any business that keeps a book inventory: IRS Publication 538 says to take a physical inventory at reasonable intervals and adjust the book amount to agree with it.
Go to Take Inventory.
- Tap Recount auto-tracked items.
Count what is on the shelf for each product. The page does not show the expected number, so the number that you see does not influence your count.
- Tap Save recount.
Each recount becomes the new baseline. Sales after the recount subtract from the new number. Owners, managers and staff can recount. The recount shows in the activity history as Recount.
The recount page groups the products by storage area and shows a Last recounted date under each one. You do not have to count every product. Save recount saves only the products that have a number.
Find shrinkage in the Product report
Shrinkage is stock that left the shelf without a sale. The Product report of an auto-tracked product has a Reconciliation History card. Each recount is one row: the expected stock from sales, the counted stock, and the gap in units and dollars. A Total shrinkage line adds up the rows.
The expected stock is the stock just before the recount, minus all the sales of the recount day. The day's sales can come in before or after the recount. For example, Toast auto-sync brings each day's sales the next morning, and the row then updates. Until the day's sales come in, the gap in that row includes them.
The sales of the recount day never subtract from the recount itself. Rinvy treats them as sold before you counted. If you recount early in the day, the sales after the recount make the gap smaller than the real loss, so recount near the end of the day.
In the soda example, you upload Wednesday's sales after close and then recount: 16 bottles. The row reads Expected 18 · Counted 16, a loss of 2 bottles. Thursday's sales then subtract from 16.
The Variance report leaves auto-tracked products out. Their expected use and their actual use both come from the same sales, so their variance would always be zero.
When the sales feed stops
If the sales feed stops, the stock of an auto-tracked product stays at its last number. If your sales data is two or more open days behind, Home shows a Sales data is stale row in Worth a look. Closed days do not count. Upload the missing sales, or look at your Toast sync, to clear the row.
Turn off auto-tracking
Open the product on Products.
- Turn off the Auto-tracked switch.
- Tap Save product.
The product shows on the count sheet again. Rinvy keeps its menu item, so that you can turn auto-tracking on again later. If your kitchen moves to the Free plan, you can still turn auto-tracking off.