Toilet roll road test

Grocy is now operational; but where to start? At the bottom of course!

Staying with single use items, as they are easiest to work with, toilet rolls ;are easy to quantify, very definitely something that needs to be kept above a minimum stock level and I am happy for one taken off the shelf to count as used. Most of the toilet rolls are stored in the loft, as there is plenty of space up there and they don't go off, so it is no problem to bulk buy them from Costco in a big packet (10 packs of 4 rolls). However, this means that checking how many are in stock from downstairs is quite inconvenient.

The first step is to set up toilet rolls on Grocy, as we did previously for tins of baked beans. We'll need to set up a storage location, the Loft, the shop that they are purchased from, Costco, the quantity unit that they are measured in, Rolls, and the item itself, Kirkland Triple Satin Bath Tissue.

The location first,

and then a shop,

and finally the quantity unit.

Not complicated.

But setting up the item will be slightly more convoluted than for baked beans, as the toilet paper comes in packs of 10 packets of four rolls each. I don't intend to count individual rolls, anything less than four packs mandates an emergency purchase, so once they are opened they can count as consumed. That is the on the ground situation anyway.

The first thing to deal with is a new concept – Parent/Child relationships for products. From the text above you might imagine that the bulk packet of forty rolls would be the "Parent" item and that each of the 10 packs of 4 rolls are a "Child" item. But the "Parent/Child" relationship in Grocy is one of "Types of product/Specific product". So the Parent product in our case is Toilet Rolls, whilst the Kirkland Brand paper is a type of Toilet Roll and so is a Child product. If we switch to a different brand of paper, Andrex, Charmin, or whatever, then these would also all be Child products of Toilet Rolls. For another example, apples would be a Parent product and Golden Delicious or Cox's Orange Pippin Child products.

Armed with that knowledge we can set up Toilet Rolls as a Parent product and, as you will see later, this will allow us to easily see how many rolls are on hand at any particular time.

So we set up an active parent product, Toilet Rolls.

We can pick Loft from the Default location dropdown and set the Minimum stock amount as 16 rolls (ie 4 packs of four) allowing enough time to return to Costco and replenish the stock before any unfortunate incidents occur.

For the next set of mandatory fields (Quantity unit stock/Default quantity unit purchase/Default quantity unit consume/Quantity unit for prices) we need to drop in the value Roll from the dropdown box.

The last two changes to the default product settings are to check Can't be opened, as we don't want to subdivide them further, and Disable own stock, which means that they won't be available for a purchase action and should only function as a summary stock level item.

Now that the parent product is set up we can move on the child product, the delicately titled, Kirkland Triple Satin Bath Tissue.

The Picture and Description were simply lifted from the Costco website. We can select Toilet Rolls as the Parent product and Loft as the Default location from the dropdowns. The Product specific QU conversions are next. These are required so that, when we buy a bulk pack, Grocy can convert that into 4-packs to show them at the stock level.

The first thing that has be done is to set up some new quantity units, Case and Pack.

With these we can define a bag of 10 packs of 4 rolls as a Case and each of the packets of 4 rolls as a Pack and then set up quantity conversions between the two. So when a case is bought the stock level will have an extra 10 packs added to it and the parent product, toilet rolls, will rise by 40.

[Apologies that what I am showing you isn't what is on your screen, but the HA-Grocy Add-on has an unfixed bug at the moment.]

The Default shop is set to Costco and the Minimum stock amount as 4 (equivalent to 16 rolls). There's obviously no need to tangle with best before dates for this product.

Finally we will track and use stock (Quantity unit stock/Default quantity unit consume) in Packs and buy and track prices (Default quantity unit purchase/Quantity unit for prices) in Cases. The Quick consume/open amounts are set to 1 (pack), which completes the set up.

Returning to the Stock overview we can see both Toilet Rolls and Kirkland Triple Satin Bath Tissue have been added to the product list. With 3 packs in stock we have 12 toilet rolls on hand (not enough!). Hence the small shopping cart icon next to the stock amount meaning that the items are on a shopping list.

At this point we have the basic functionality of toilet roll stock tracking working in Grocy. The next task is to add barcodes so they can be purchased and consumed via scanning in the Grocy Android app (we've covered this previously), one barcode for the 4-packs and one for the case of 40 rolls.

To test the system I "bought" one case and "consumed" two 4-packs using the Grocy app.

On the opening screen we can see that there are now three products in stock; compared to one in the last image from the previous post on using the Grocy app.

To add toilet rolls to our stock we select 🛒 Purchase to bring up the relevant screen.

Selecting the barcode icon in the Product field and scanning in the barcode from a case of toilet rolls will prefill all the fields apart from Due date. This appears to be a wrinkle in Grocy – there is no way to default a product to be unexpirable thus avoiding the next step, which is setting the Due date (just click on the field to bring up the dialog) to Never overdue. After that, the purchase can be confirmed by pressing the shopping cart at the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and a notification completes the process.

Consuming items is similarly straightforward. From the main menu select 🍴 Consume, scan in the barcode, hit the knife & fork button in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen and a notification will confirm the completed process.

You can see the stock level of the 4-packs has gone up from 3 to 11 packs (starting at 3, up 10 to 13 from the case purchase and back down 2 from 13 to 11 due to us "consuming" two packs) and the total number of toilet rolls has gone up to 44 as expected.

The final task is to update HA-Grocy with the actual stock levels. From the Stock overview page select Inventory from the left-hand menu bar (circled red).

It is simply a matter of choosing the Product and the defaults will fill all the other fields apart from Due date. The rolls are marked as Never overdue and that is that. Hitting OK generates a confirmation notice and the product set up is complete and ready to roll (sorry, couldn't resist it😀).

All is good, we now have basic barcode-based stock tracking working for this product. Adding price tracking and shopping list functionality can be tackled at a later date while I see if the new system is accepted by the household.