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The Supplies dashboard — what you spend on everything that isn't food

Food isn’t the only thing you buy. Every pizza box, every bottle of degreaser, every new ladle is money leaving the business — and it usually leaves quietly, never showing up in the food-cost numbers everyone watches. The Supplies page puts all of that non-food buying on one screen. Choose Supplies from your data dashboard’s sidebar and months of supplier orders become a picture you can read: how much you spend on packaging, cleaning, and smallwares, how it moves week to week, and where it’s growing. This page is for the owner or manager who wants to see the other half of the shopping bill — the half that’s easy to ignore until it adds up.

What it does

Your food costs get all the attention, and rightly so. But the boxes, bags, napkins, dish soap, sanitiser, tongs, and chopping boards add up to real money every month — and because none of it ends up on a plate, nobody adds it up. It’s scattered across supplier orders, mixed in with the food on the same delivery, invisible.

The Supplies page does the adding up. It reads every order you’ve placed with your suppliers, picks out only the non-food lines, and lays the spending out as plain charts: a headline total, a spend-over-time trend, a breakdown by kind of supply, your biggest suppliers, your most expensive items, and your most recent orders. There’s nothing to add up by hand and nothing to keep current — once your supplies are set up (see below), the page stays current on its own.

Like the rest of your data dashboard, this is a reading room, not a workshop. Nothing here can be edited — it mirrors what your orders recorded. If a number looks wrong, the fix is upstream in how an item is filed or how an order was entered, never here.

What counts as a supply

The page only shows non-food stock — and it knows what’s non-food because of how each item is filed. Every inventory category you create has a kind: Food, Beverage, Deli, or Other. “Other” is the non-food kind, and anything filed under an Other category is what this page calls a supply.

What you boughtFiles under (an “Other” category)
Pizza boxes, takeaway containers, paper bags, napkinsPackaging & Disposables
Dish soap, degreaser, sanitiser, descalerCleaning & Chemicals
Tongs, ladles, chopping boards, spare pansSmallwares & Equipment

The rule: if it’s stock you buy from a supplier but never serve, it’s a supply — keep it out of your food costs and watch it here instead. A roll of cling film and a wheel of parmesan ride in on the same delivery; only one belongs in your food-cost percentage.

Before it shows anything. A supply has to be filed as one to appear here. If you’ve never created an Other-kind category, this page will be empty — not because you don’t buy supplies, but because the system can’t yet tell your boxes from your cheese. The fix is a one-time setup in the admin app: under your inventory categories, add a category and set its kind to Other (or use the ready-made Packaging, Cleaning, and Smallwares ones), then file your non-food items under it. From the next order on, they flow onto this page automatically.

How to use it

Start by setting the period (top-right — 24h, 7d, 30d, 90d, 6m, 1y, All; six months is a good default) and, if you like, the comparison beside it (against the period just before, or the same period last year). Everything below re-reads itself from those choices.

Read the headline tiles first: your total supplies spend for the period, how many orders carried supplies, the average non-food spend per order, and your biggest single category. The total tile carries a small up-or-down badge against the previous period, so you see at a glance whether non-food costs are creeping up.

The big Spend over time chart underneath shows the money going out per week or per month — the buckets widen as the range grows, so the line never turns to noise. A steady climb here is the thing to catch early: packaging quietly costing more each month is a conversation with a supplier, not a surprise at year-end.

Then drop to the category breakdown — a ring showing each kind of supply’s share beside a table with the detail and a growth column. The growth colours are flipped from the menu page on purpose: green means you’re spending less than before (good), red means more. Below it, Category mix over time stacks the kinds so you can see the balance shift — the month you switched to compostable boxes will stand out.

Finally, Spend by supplier ranks who you’re buying non-food from, Top items by spend names the individual supplies costing you most, and Recent supply orders lists your latest deliveries with just their non-food portion. When you spot something, the fix lives back in the admin app — change a supplier, re-file an item, or question a price.

Worked example

Maria runs a trattoria and opens the Supplies dashboard on a Monday morning, six-month period.

The headline reads ฿48,000 on supplies, up 12% on the previous six months — enough to make her look closer. The Spend over time chart shows it was flat until March, then stepped up and stayed there. The category breakdown explains it: Packaging & Disposables is now ฿26,000, well over half, and its growth badge is red at +31%. The Category mix over time pins it to March — the month she moved to compostable takeaway boxes. They cost more; now she can see exactly how much more, and decide whether the greener box is worth ฿6,000 a year or whether it’s time to renegotiate.

Cleaning & Chemicals sits at ฿14,000 but one month spikes hard — she remembers the bulk sanitiser buy, a one-off, nothing to chase. Spend by supplier shows a single packaging supplier taking 60% of the non-food bill, which makes them worth a phone call about volume pricing. And in Top items by spend, the humble 16-inch pizza box is her single most expensive supply — more than any cleaning product. She’d never have guessed that, and now it’s the first thing she’ll raise with the supplier.

Five minutes, and the half of the shopping bill nobody watches is suddenly as legible as the menu.