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A batch is one production run. Open Production from the Raw materials hub and Start a batch. Choose what you are making and how many, and Stockful walks its bill of materials to show exactly what it will take, at the quantity you asked for.

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The three states

Reserving rather than consuming at the start is deliberate: the material has not been used yet, so the ledger should not say it has. What it does do is stop the reorder page telling you the stock is available when a batch is already relying on it.

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Closing a batch

When you close one you enter what you actually made and what it actually took. Both can differ from the plan, and that is the point.
  • Finished goods go to Shopify through the same path a stock adjustment uses, so they appear in the product’s inventory history like any other change.
  • Material is consumed at the actual quantities, not the planned ones.
  • The gap between planned and actual is the yield variance.
Cancelling an in-progress batch releases its reservation and writes no movements. Nothing was consumed, so nothing is recorded as consumed.

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Yield variance

A batch that planned 24 cookies and made 22 has a variance of -2. One batch tells you nothing; a pattern tells you a lot. A recipe that consistently under-yields is either wrong or the process is losing something, and both are worth knowing. The Yield Variance report on the Reports page sorts by the worst shortfalls. Because a material has no Shopify quantity to reconcile against, closing batches honestly is what keeps material stock true. A batch closed at its planned numbers when it really took more will drift, and nothing can detect it.