Setting up items for a microgreen business

[sproutculture]

Hi Square Community,

I just started a microgreen business 5 months ago, and I'm growing fast! Before I get any bigger, I felt it would be wise to clean up and optimize my Item list. 

Background

I have multiple crops of microgreens, which I'm selling in various sizes, and to various sales channels. Each sales channel uses a different price point.

For example, let's use broccoli microgreens. My current workflow is as follows:

• I create a separate item for each product size: 1.5 oz, 3 oz, and 6 oz sizes. (i.e. 1.5 oz. - Broccoli Microgreens, 3 oz. - Broccoli Microgreens, and 6 oz. Broccoli Microgreens)
• And for each product size, I add one variation for each sales channel: retail, wholesale, restaurant, and institutional. Each variation has the corresponding price point for the given sales channel.

Objective

I want to ensure optimal reporting. For example, I want to account for sales (i.e. the Retail variation with the $6.00 price point) at a given location (i.e. Farmer's Market).

All that being said, what would be the best way to set up my items in Square?

Thank you for your help!

[Lovewell · Accepted solution]

@sproutculture congratulations on your quick growth! 
we are a coffee shop and also do occasional pop ups. Most recently it was serving at a summer camp. 

For us whenever we have a pop up, we creat a separate category for that menu. (I.e. Camp Menu as the category and an item would be Camp Cold brew.) for sizes, we add those as modifiers for an item since you are able to add pricing to modifiers. 
(i.e item- Latte: $4.75 modifier 12oz $0 and 16oz. .50¢ )

So for your items I think you would have like 4 categories 1. Retail 2. Wholesale 3. Restaurant. 4. Institutional 

Then you would create your broccoli micro greens at its base price and either add your modifiers as the sizes with an additional cost as the size goes up. Or you could do the variations as your different sizes with each sizes full price. 

then when you are looking at your report you’ll be able to see which category sold what! 

I hope this makes sense! Please let me j is if you have any questions! 

cheers! 

[sproutculture · Accepted solution]

So,... I've gone ahead and rebuilt all my products and created variations as suggested; my different sizes, with each size's full price. Product titles are as follows "Broccoli - Organic Microgreens" with my sales channels as the different categories (i.e. retail, institutional, etc.).

However, there's a major problem -- when I create an invoice and then add items to it, I have 6 different versions of "Broccoli - Organic Microgreens" but no identifier to allow me to distinguish between restaurant and institutional.

See the attached image:

Any ideas?

[Lovewell · Accepted solution]

@sproutculture congratulations on your quick growth! 
we are a coffee shop and also do occasional pop ups. Most recently it was serving at a summer camp. 

For us whenever we have a pop up, we creat a separate category for that menu. (I.e. Camp Menu as the category and an item would be Camp Cold brew.) for sizes, we add those as modifiers for an item since you are able to add pricing to modifiers. 
(i.e item- Latte: $4.75 modifier 12oz $0 and 16oz. .50¢ )

So for your items I think you would have like 4 categories 1. Retail 2. Wholesale 3. Restaurant. 4. Institutional 

Then you would create your broccoli micro greens at its base price and either add your modifiers as the sizes with an additional cost as the size goes up. Or you could do the variations as your different sizes with each sizes full price. 

then when you are looking at your report you’ll be able to see which category sold what! 

I hope this makes sense! Please let me j is if you have any questions! 

cheers! 

[sproutculture]

Thank you @Lovewell !!!!!

[sproutculture]

When you say "...add your modifiers as the sizes..." are you referring to Options?

Thank you

[sproutculture · Accepted solution]

So,... I've gone ahead and rebuilt all my products and created variations as suggested; my different sizes, with each size's full price. Product titles are as follows "Broccoli - Organic Microgreens" with my sales channels as the different categories (i.e. retail, institutional, etc.).

However, there's a major problem -- when I create an invoice and then add items to it, I have 6 different versions of "Broccoli - Organic Microgreens" but no identifier to allow me to distinguish between restaurant and institutional.

See the attached image:

Any ideas?

[missmicrogreens · Accepted solution]

Hi there - I also have a microgreens farm in Illinois. I just enter each item as its own SKU - restaurant/wholesale price, retail price-- its just quicker when updating invoices. Reports show all my item sales and I know whats what-- I never really create reports for just wholesale. 

[Lovewell]

Hi! Sorry for taking a bit to respond things have been a bit busy for us. So I see that each of those broccoli items have different prices. So are all those items your new updated products? Or are some of them old that you can get rid of. The other option would be adding (retail) (Institutional) etc. to the end of the product title. 

Thoughts on that?

[sproutculture]

Thanks for following up, @Lovewell.

I've gotten rid of all obsolete items. I'm using a similar setup to what @missmicrogreens suggested - editing the item name, so that I can differentiate at the time of sale what is what.

[VanKalkerFarms]

The way we have our garden center setup is different than having multiple price points under one item.  I like to keep track of everything separately so I can see quickly what part of the business is handling what.

So we have 3 locations set up in our Square account.  Retail, Wholesale, and markets.  We started with it all in one location but it throws off many of the Square analytics like average sale (retail is like $96 but wholesale is like $700 so if they were in the same location the overall average sale is way off of either option).  Having it be 3 locations does add the step of managing locations, depending on your setup that could be as simple as switching in-app (which is easy now with in-app location switching), or what we do is all retail goes thru the 5 Square stands and all wholesale goes thru the 3 Square terminals.  

Basically, you are just copying your items over to each location and setting the price per location.  It hurts when I look back at our data and the first 6 years are all mixed up, but thankfully we separated the types of business and have great records for the last 5 years.

Hopefully, that makes sense and if you have any further questions don't hesitate to ask.