> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.stockful.app/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Overview

> Track the things you buy and consume to make what you sell: ingredients, fabric, wax, packaging. Their stock, what they go into, and the batches that turn one into the other.

**Raw materials** are the things you buy and consume to make what you sell. Flour, wax, fabric, thread, packaging. They are not Shopify products, so Shopify does not track them, and until now neither did anything else you use.

Stockful holds them as their own catalogue, with their own stock, their own suppliers and their own reorder maths, and connects them to the products you sell through bills of materials. Open it from **Inventory → Raw materials**.

<Note>
  Because a material is not a Shopify product, Stockful is the only record of it. There is nothing to reconcile against, so material stock is only as accurate as what you record: run your consumption through batches, and count regularly.
</Note>

## What fits together

Four pieces, in the order you would set them up.

|                                                                    |                                                                                                      |
| ------------------------------------------------------------------ | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| [Materials](/user-guide/raw-materials/materials)                   | The catalogue. What you hold, in what unit, from which supplier.                                     |
| [Bills of materials](/user-guide/raw-materials/bills-of-materials) | What a product is made of. A recipe, in other words.                                                 |
| [Production](/user-guide/raw-materials/production)                 | A run of making something. Reserves material when a batch starts, consumes it when the batch closes. |
| [Reordering](/user-guide/raw-materials/reordering)                 | What to buy, from what production has committed and what your sales forecast will need.              |

## A worked example

A candle maker holds wax and wicks. A bill of materials says one candle takes 0.2 kg of wax and one wick. Starting a batch of 500 reserves 100 kg and 500 wicks; closing it consumes what was actually used and adds 500 candles to Shopify.

Meanwhile the reorder page watches the wax: your candle sales are forecast forward, walked back through the bill of materials, and netted against the candles you already hold. When the wax that implies falls below what you have, it tells you to buy more, in time for its lead time.

## Reporting on it

Six built-in reports cover materials and production, under **Materials & production** on the [Reports](/user-guide/reports) page. All of the underlying data is queryable too: see the [Materials](/stockfulql/datasets/materials), [Material movements](/stockfulql/datasets/material_movements) and [Production](/stockfulql/datasets/production) datasets.