What are stores and how to manage them in tspoonlab?
In tspoonlab, you can organize your ingredients into "virtual" stores. Stores let you keep detailed stock control, optimize purchasing, and avoid overstocking or supply shortages. They also adapt your organization to your physical space and storage needs. A store is where purchases, sales, productions, and waste data come together, so you can analyze how products and recipes move.
Each product must be assigned to a single store within the app, which simplifies management and makes reporting easier.
Inside each store, you can separate products into sub-categories called "locations".
💡 Tip: Keep only the minimum necessary in each store to avoid supply problems (if it's too small) or tied-up cash and waste risk from expiry (if it's too large).
How to create stores in tspoonlab
This video guides you through creating stores in tspoonlab. You can also follow the step-by-step guide below.
Step by step: creating a store
How to create a new store
Go to "Management" and then click "Stores".
To add a new store, click the three-dot menu next to the search bar and select "Add store".
Enter a clear, descriptive name (e.g. "Food", "Beverages", or "Packaging") to make it easy to identify. You can add a comment to describe the store's purpose.
Select the store type you need:
Store with entries, exits and inventories: records every movement — entries (from purchases or productions) and exits (from sales, waste, or transfers) — and lets you run periodic inventories to verify stock. Ideal for full, detailed history of each product.
Inventory-only store: used only to count and control the available quantity of certain products, without recording entry or exit movements. Useful in specific cases, e.g. products that don't need their entry documented (such as a one-off stock of a prepared ingredient).
📌 Note: tspoonlab has the concept of default stores (for ingredients, recipes and dishes). If you mark a store as default, any action that generates a movement on a product not registered in another store will be added to it automatically.
Add or remove products in a store
Once the store is created, the next step is to add the products (or ingredients) you'll manage.
From the store interface in tspoonlab, locate the store you created and click the three-dot menu to open its options. Select "Add products" to search for and add the items you need.
If you need to remove products, use "Remove products". Note that removing a product deletes that product's movement history (purchases, sales, productions).
Move products between stores
In tspoonlab, click the three-dot menu next to the product you need to move.
Use "Move a quantity to another store" to transfer the product from one store to another.
Select the destination store and confirm the movement. This is especially useful to redistribute stock according to operational needs or to reorganize products across your stores.
Quantity to transfer: specify the quantity you want to move, especially when moving only part of the available stock. When you confirm, the system records the movement and automatically adjusts stock in both the source and destination stores.
Common reasons for movements: restocking a store near the production area, or consolidating products to optimize space. Efficient stock rotation through these movements also helps prevent waste.
📢 Important: Each product must have a single store, so entries and exits work correctly. If you have products spread across different places or with different uses, assign them locations within the same store.
Inventory valuation in your store costs
When you create or edit a store in tspoonlab, there's a dedicated section to define the accounting criteria the system uses to calculate the value of your stock and the real cost of your recipes. Depending on your operation, you can choose between two valuation methods:
FIFO (First In, First Out): the first raw materials or units to enter the store are the first to be consumed or leave. The system calculates your dish costs and inventory value strictly from the price of the oldest available batches, absorbing price increases in chronological order of purchase. Recommended for exact batch traceability against expiry.
Weighted average cost: unifies stock cost by taking a weighted average each time new goods or a supplier invoice are registered (total accumulated cost over total stock volume). This stabilizes ingredient values in your recipe costings and productions, smoothing price swings or market spikes in your period-end financial reports.
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