Supplies & Bill of Materials

If you manufacture, prepare, or assemble what you sell, you're working with supplies. Supplies are the raw materials, ingredients, or components that go into your products. Catlog's supply and Bill of Materials system helps you track them, link them to your products, and automatically account for their use when orders are placed.

Supplies are the inputs that make your products possible. For a restaurant, supplies might be rice, beef, spices, and cooking oil. For a fashion business, they might be fabric, thread, zips, and labels. For a candle maker, wax, wicks, and fragrance oils.

Supplies are distinct from products — your customers don't buy your supplies directly. They buy the finished product your supplies went into.

A Bill of Materials (BOM) is a list of the supplies that make up a product. When you link supplies to a product on Catlog, you're defining its bill of materials — specifying which supplies are used and how much of each one goes into a single unit.

For example, a batch of 10 candles might use 500g of wax, 10 wicks, and 5ml of fragrance oil. If you define that in Catlog, it knows exactly what to deduct from your supply stock every time an order is placed.

Once supplies are linked to a product, Catlog handles the maths for you. When a customer orders that product, the corresponding supplies are automatically deducted from your stock.

You no longer need to manually update supply quantities after every order. Catlog does it based on the bill of materials, keeping your supply levels accurate in real time.

Every order that includes products with linked supplies will show a Bill of Materials — a list of all the supplies consumed to fulfill that specific order. This is useful for production teams who need to know what to pull from stock before they start making anything.

Each order also has a production sheet — a document that combines the full order details with the bill of materials. It's designed to be printed or shared with whoever is preparing or assembling the order, giving them everything they need in one place without having to toggle between screens.

Supplies require a cost price. This is what Catlog uses to calculate how much your supplies contribute to the cost of making each product. Accurate supply cost prices feed directly into your profit calculations — if your supply costs are wrong, your margin figures will be wrong too.

Catlog keeps a full history of supply usage across all orders — how much of each supply has been consumed, when, and tied to which products and orders. This helps you understand your consumption patterns, plan restocking, and spot any unusual usage.

💡 The biggest benefit of supply management is that it removes the manual work of stock tracking after every order. Once your bill of materials is set up correctly, your supply levels stay accurate automatically.