should employee meal be created as non-inventory item and expensed as employee meal in P&L?
Is it same with all other items which are not inventory and also not fixed assets?
TIA
What do you mean by âEmployee mealâ ?
Are these meals provided by the business for the employees?
Are the meals purchased by the employee on behalf of the business?
or something else?
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Non-inventory items are goods or services you frequently buy or sell that are not inventory items. See Create non-inventory items | Manager. For example, a carpenter buys the same kind of nails every week, but never sells them. They are just consumed. Or a janitorial service company sells office-cleaning services to many customers, priced per week.
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@Suraj239; Iâm understanding these to be meals provided by the restaurant to the staff, either for free or at a discount.
In industry practice these are inventory items, and the sale to the employee is handled just as a sale to a customer, but with an âEmployee Mealâ discount applied. For example, if an employee buys Item #1 as their meal, you process the sale normally, then apply a discount. This works to keep your COGS, Net Sales, and Inventory in line.
If the âEmployee Mealâ is simply the chef using food to prepare a family-style meal for the entire staff, you would also set this up as an inventory item and process like a normal sale with a discount applied. The downside to this method (based on another post where you mentioned you were using Inventory Kits), is that you would have to update the kit for the basic foods, and amounts used, each time such a meal was prepared.
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In our setup, we give each employee a Meal Stub which they can exchange for a certain amount of discount in our kitchenâs operation.
By the way, the kitchen is a totally different entity owned and operated by the main company.
The main company is then billed by the kitchen for payment of the meal stubs claimed every end of the week.
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@Joe91 Sorry for not being clear . Company buys raw materials and there is a separate kitchen for employees where meal is prepared for all the employees regardless of their duty time. So My question was where should I create those raw materials? thank you!
@Tut got it! anything other than inventory item and fixed assets must be categorised as non-inventory item ,qty movement and stock record of which cannot be tracked.I have customers who bring some exotic chicken or others by themselves and ask us to cook for them,where we charge them for the service only.Now I think I have to create a non-inventory item as âcooking serviceâ and sell that accordingly.Thank you!
@p4unger thank you for an elaborated answer. As I have responded to @Joe91 my situation is different than what you have assumed but those are definitely something which I will face now and then so thank you again.
@marofrancia seems like a very transparent and clean system 
thank you!
one more quick question to you guys, specially to @p4unger , I have already created inventory kit for almost all final products âŚI had no idea about cloning that time and I now know that I can simply clone and add/delete few ingredients to make it another finished item but now that I have already created those inventory kits without filling âBOMâ and have also used those kits in transaction forms. So is there any idea by which I donât need to go individually to all the kits and fill âBOMâ? Thank you.
I believe you may be able to use âBatch Update;â you can check the guide here; https://www.manager.io/guides/9572.
However I have never had the need to use this function so I am not certain how it would work, or if it would be any faster than updating the kits individually.
@p4unger I have created a batch and I also have exported but have never updated and deleted! 
Will definitely try once and will share with you!
@lubos BTW batch creation for inventory kit hadnât worked but it did a great job for customer,supplier and inventory items.
I suspect you had two problems:
- The bill of materials items cannot be listed as plain language, but must be UUIDs.
- Both bill of material items and quantities are multi-line entries in single cells.
@tut I found out the idea to type multi lines in a cell but I didnât understand your first point. Do you mean to say that if both the problems are solved then we can create batch for inventory kit too? If yes then please elaborate on your first point. Thank you.
The easiest way to understand my point is to create at least one inventory kit and start a Batch Update. You will see the format you need to duplicate to complete a Batch Create. (Only the Key column at the end is eliminated. That is created by the program.) You will see that you need the UUID for every item in the bill of materials cell.
@Tut I spend almost 3 hours on finding out how I can insert GUID in BOM fields but couldnât do so and didnât find any appropriate resources to learn from. when I just entered BOM items and BOM qty (multi lined) in the spreadsheet and pasted in the managerâs update box, only BOM qty got updated in the inventory kit but BOM items were still blank âŚ
Please suggest me any resources that I can learn from âŚThank you.
Search the forum for UUID or Batch Create.