After you have worked hard to harvest your crops and yield from your animals, you'll likely want to sell some of the items you ended up with. Farmbrite has an entire Market section for you to create your products and list them for sale in your online store, and then process and ship orders out to your customers. But what if not everything that you harvested is for sale?
Think about some of these situations :
- You harvested hay from your fields, but also need to keep some in reserve for overwintering your cows.
- You harvested various crops from your beds, but have some prepaid CSA shares that you need to set aside.
- You yields gallons of milks from your cows and dozens of eggs from your chickens to sell, but also run a small baking business where you need some of those harvests to create your manufactured products.
There are many more examples like this, but the main idea is the same; not all of your harvest should be for sale in your online store, as you might have preexisting plans for some of it. You can account for this with a few simple selections in your product and inventory setup.
The first step to account for this is to create your products and inventory items.
When you create the product, you'll see an option to "Limit sales based on inventory". Checking that gives you a box to add how many are for sale in your market. In our example below we have created peppers to sell, and limited the sales to our current inventory of 25 pounds.
Then when you create your inventory item (or edit an existing one), you'll have an option to associate that product to it. Selecting the product here establishes a connection with your inventory for two purposes:
- When you add or remove from the inventory item from a harvest, delivery, or usage around your farm, you'll be able to check a box to update the linked product inventory (available for online sales) as well.
- When you sell the product in your store, you can then remove it from your inventory to fulfill the pick list and support traceability back to harvests.
In the image below we connected our Jalapeno Peppers product to this existing inventory item. Note our existing inventory of 25 pounds, matching what we already input on the product in the section above.
Now, when we add or remove from the inventory, we'll see an additional checkbox to "Update linked product amount available". Checking this box will increase the amount available for online sales in the product by the amount we add here. Of course, if you don't check this box, the quantity will still be added to your inventory, but the product quantity will remain the same. We are adding 30 pounds of peppers below and selecting that checkbox, so you'll see the total of 55 reflected in both the inventory item and product amount available for online sales.
This same checkbox is also available when you add to inventory directly from a harvest. We are using the same peppers below as our example, but this is true from an animal yield as well.
Finally, if you'd like that option to be selected by default for a particular inventory item, you can select the box to "Update product amount available when adding or removing" from the inventory item configuration. This could be help if the situations we outlined at the top of this article are never applicable for you, and that additions and removals should always be included in the product quantity available for sale online.
Reach out to us and let us know if you have any questions on this feature!