One beef, three suppliers, one price
Every invoice line lands on an ingredient in the canonical base. Three spellings of the same beef are one ingredient with one weighted price and one history — and that is what everything else stands on.
The ingredient base in Owlly merges invoice lines from different suppliers into one canonical ingredient priced per base unit, so recipes, stock and price alerts all compute on the same price rather than on three separate ones.
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Why does one price matter?
Because as long as “BEEF MINCE 5KG” and “minced beef 90/10” are two rows, neither has enough points to show a trend. Merged into one ingredient they have six months of history, and it is visible that the price has moved 8.2% since June.
That one price feeds twelve recipes at once. It changes once — and twelve dish cards know their new cost in the same second.
How does Owlly know how many kilograms are in a pack?
From the invoice, where the supplier states it, and from a confirmed conversion factor where they do not. The factor belongs to the ingredient rather than to a single line, so once confirmed it applies to every future delivery.
This is where costings break most often — a 500 g jar booked as 1 kg halves the cost of every dish that uses it. That is why an uncertain unit stops in the queue instead of passing quietly.
Questions about ingredient base
01What happens when a supplier renames a product?
The line is matched to the existing ingredient, so the price history does not fork. If the system is not confident about the match, it goes to a person to confirm rather than being guessed silently.
02Do I have to build the ingredient base by hand?
No. Ingredients are created from the invoice lines that arrive anyway — you only confirm the matches the system is unsure about. The base grows with your deliveries.
03Does the same ingredient have different prices from different suppliers?
Yes, and that is the point: an ingredient carries a weighted price from recent deliveries, and underneath it the price at each supplier separately. That is what makes “where is it cheaper” answerable at all.
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