Expenses & invoicing

[Joelk00]

Any thoughts on adding these as features in the future?

[Danny Hall]

Hi

Roastmaster lets you run reports for Bean Usage of Roasts, Blends and Cuppings (Bean inventory will be added as well in the coming update). Roasts, of course, would be the most important. If you create and sell signature blends, though, there's some good information in the Blends report as well. If you are faithful and record the "Cost per" field in your green bean library, these reports will provide a cost analysis of your activity in the app for any date range. You can then export that data as a normalized file for Excel or Numbers. I built the reporting feature with extensibility in mind, so adding different report types is trivial work on my end. Please feel free to offer any suggestions of report types you're interested in seeing.

By invoicing, do you mean a way to track invoicing per lots you receive? If so, then - yes, I do, and I'm excited about it. That is actually what will make iCloud a possibility in Roastmaster. Keeping reliable inventory was always the sticking point with iCloud - it didn't provide robust support for conflict resolution, so some situations involving inventory changes would have to be guessed if these changes happened too closely together on different devices.

So to circumvent - the idea is this: break inventory into "Lots" or "Skids". Whenever you receive inventory, Roastmaster tracks it as a Lot, with its own price, and a date stamp. Then, when you roast, if you have more than one Lot, you can choose which one you're roasting from. From my thinking, this would provide a way to track the age of the beans, as well as varying costs, and - I'm pretty sure - a way around the iCloud ambiguity. Please let me know your thoughts here, I haven't fleshed it out entirely in my mind, so the details are bound to change when I begin to implement it, but any input is welcome.

Kind regards
Danny

[Joelk00]

Hi I have been thinking more about this. I think it would be great if you could add a field to the roast itself that was for "sale price" this way you could run a report for inventory that told you what you spent on green as well as a roast report that gave you info on the coffe that was sold. This would allow people to track profit based on money spent as well as coffee sold. You could also even expand further if there was a way to include other costs such as bags, gas/propane, etc. his would be a really great add on for those who sell coffee as well as roast.

In regards to invoicing I had the idea that if there was an "export to invoice" option for example, that all of the relevant information from that roast could be automatically exported to a somple excel or word doc. That would create an invoice to send your customers for that roast. It could include the bean type, description and other info.

Not sure if I am thinking too far outside the box here for what you are looking to do with your program but wanted to share. Thanks for all your hard work. Just ordered the bluetherm duo today!

[Danny Hall]

Hi Joel

Excellent ideas!

My brain started wrapping around a lot of this when I built the reporting features. I love the idea of having a profit analysis to go hand-in-hand with the cost analysis.

Speaking on the simple side of things, I don’t know if a sell price fits as an attribute of a roast, or an attribute of a bean. I guess there’s an argument for both. On a bean seems easer to manage, but on a roast seems more flexible.

I’ll have to give this one some thought. Either way, I’ve added to my wish list. Thanks for the suggestions!!

Please let me know how you make out with your Bluetherm Duo. Any questions, just let me know.