A bill of materials (BOM) is the recipe behind each of your products — what goes into one unit, what each input costs, and who supplies it. Once your BOMs are set up, Pesto uses them to cost your products, drive your production runs, and work out what you need to order from your suppliers.

Before you start, make sure your products are set up in Pesto (see Section 2). You'll also need your materials in inventory, which is Step 1 below.

Step 1: Adding Your Materials to Inventory

Go to Inventory and open the Materials tab. This is where your raw materials, ingredients and packaging live — held as separate lots, so each one keeps its own batch code and use-by date.

To add stock, click Add Batches. You have two options:

• Upload a delivery note or spreadsheet — drop the document in and Pesto extracts the materials, quantities, batch codes and best-before dates for you, the same way it reads purchase orders. Check it over and approve.
• Add manually — enter the material, quantity, batch code and use-by date yourself.

You can hold several lots of the same material with different batch codes and best-before dates. Pesto keeps them separate, so a production run can allocate from the right lot.

Step 2: Setting Supplier Prices for Your Materials

The Cost / unit on your BOM comes from your supplier profiles. Go to Profiles > Suppliers and add each material against the supplier that provides it, with the price you pay.

If the same material comes from more than one supplier, you can set a percentage allocation between them — Pesto uses this when it works out purchase orders. Full supplier setup is covered in Section 9, Demand Planning & Supplier Orders.

Step 3: Building the Bill of Materials

Go to Products, click the edit (pencil) icon on the master product, then open the BOM tab.

Raw materials, finished materials and primary packaging (jars, lids) go on the master product's BOM. Pack-specific packaging is added per variant.

Add a line for each input and fill in:

• Line — the material
• Qty / unit — how much of that material goes into one unit of the finished product (e.g. 30g Parmesan, 20g Basil, 1 jar)