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Link your sales items (POS) šŸ”—

Link your POS items to products or recipe costings to automate stock and know the exact Food Cost of every dish in tspoonlab.

How and why link your sales items to products and recipe costings?

Linking your POS (Point of Sale) sales items with tspoonlab is a key step in managing your hospitality business, because it lets you automate stock control by instantly deducting the ingredients from your stores with every sale. This integration is also essential to calculate your real Food Cost, letting you know the exact percentage relationship between raw-material cost and sale price, to guarantee a real profit margin on every dish and prevent invisible losses.

Link sales items (POS)

In this video we show you how to link each item sold through your POS to a product or recipe costing so it is deducted from its store, and to get the exact Food Cost for each item sold. You can follow the step-by-step after the tutorial video.

Step-by-step: link your products and recipe costings in tspoonlab

Below we explain the process step by step to connect your till-system items with your database:

Enable the integration and select the point of sale

  1. Contact your tspoonlab account advisor to enable your POS integration according to your till system.

  2. The first step is to create the sale-product groups. To do it correctly, follow the step-by-step in the article Create and configure sale-product groups.

  3. Once the integration is complete and the sales groups are created, go to the top menu under "Management".

  4. Under "Management", select the "Clients" module and select the client with the name of your terminal or point of sale.

How to associate unlinked items

  1. After organising your item groups, go straight to the "Unlinked products" section.

  2. Find the sales item you want to connect in the list and click the three-dot menu to the right of the itemā€™s row.

  3. In the dropdown, select "Associate with new product".

  4. To link the product or recipe costing, in the pop-up window click the field highlighted in red and select "Product" to search your database for the matching ingredient or recipe/dish.

  5. Check that the unit of measure is correct.

  6. Assign the item to the product group it belongs to.

  7. Click "OK" to save the changes. The item will disappear from this tab and move automatically to the "Sale products" section.

šŸ“Œ Note: To ensure fully reliable linking and that Food Cost metrics are calculated correctly, your products or recipes must have a cost assigned in the system.

Analytics metrics and visual alerts in tspoonlab

When you expand any group under "Sale products", the app shows the average of all the groupā€™s values and each itemā€™s card with key analytics:

  • Current cost: calculated and updated automatically according to registered purchases and supplier invoices.

  • Food Cost and contribution margin: shows the real difference between the raw-material cost and the sale price excluding VAT (Value Added Tax).

  • Theoretical price: the net price at which you should sell the item to meet your initial cost target (for example, to keep 30% Food Cost on a product costing ā‚¬0.90, the system suggests a theoretical price of ā‚¬3 excluding VAT).

  • Final sale price: the retail sale price with VAT already included.

Visual profitability alerts

To make control easier, the system includes automatic visual alerts:

  • If an itemā€™s Food Cost exceeds the limit set for its group, it is marked in red along with its price.

  • The same happens if its contribution is below the group average, letting you instantly identify which dishes are hurting your profitability.

Auditing and stock control

When you expand any linked product, you have direct access to its history to audit sales:

  • Eye icon: takes you to the specific day of the sale to check the item was processed correctly.

  • Cart icon: shows in detail which ingredients or raw materials are being deducted from your stock.

  • Store movements: if you go to the relevant store, youā€™ll see all the stock movements automatically linked to that sale.

šŸ“¢ Attention: Remember that the cost of your sales items is dynamic; it adapts to the reality of your business as you enter new delivery notes and invoices from your suppliers into the platform.

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