Tracking low-stock ingredients
This article explains how stock and low-stock flagging actually work.
Before you start
Set your low-stock threshold under Settings → Pricing & Orders.
Steps
- Stock changes are recorded through actions like purchase confirmations and production completions, and through the Ingredients screen's own Stock field, described below.
- Recipes and components each have their own low-stock-inclusion toggle. Turn this off for something you don't want counted toward low-stock calculations (e.g. a rarely-made recipe skewing the numbers).
The Shopping List only lists genuine shortfalls, factoring in current stock and your low-stock threshold.
The Ingredients table with its Stock column
What to expect
Stock is genuinely ledger-based under the hood. The Ingredients screen's Stock column looks like a plain editable number field, but typing a new value there doesn't overwrite anything directly. Behind the scenes MakrPrep works out the difference between what you typed and the true sum of that ingredient's stock movement history, then records that difference as a new movement (logged as a manual adjustment). The number you see afterwards is still just the ledger total. There's no separate stock-history/audit screen to view that movement log directly, but the underlying mechanism is confirmed ledger-based, not a direct overwrite.
Common issues
- Stock never seems to go negative even after heavy use: Needs verification: previously described as a hard floor at zero by design; not re-tested this pass.
- A recipe I rarely make is skewing low-stock flags: turn off its low-stock-inclusion toggle in Recipe Book (or Components) so it stops counting toward the threshold calculation.