Goal: Understand the key components of RoastLog's inventory system and how they work together.
Prerequisites: You must have a RoastLog account.
The Foundation of Your Coffee Business
Welcome to RoastLog's inventory management system! Linsey and I designed this system specifically for specialty coffee roasters who need to track green coffee from origin to roastery. Understanding a few key concepts will help you get the most from our platform.
Key Inventory Concepts
RoastLog's inventory system is built around three core elements:
Parent Coffees - A way to organize coffees (often by origin)
Bean Lots - Specific shipments of a particular coffee
Roastables - How you'll use the coffee in your roastery (as single origins or in pre-roast blends)
The relationship between these elements is crucial to understand:
Each Bean Lot belongs to a Parent Coffee
Each Roastable is connected to one or more Bean Lots
This structure allows you to track inventory accurately while maintaining flexibility in how you use your coffees.
Inventory Locations
One of the most important concepts in RoastLog is the idea of inventory locations. We track coffee in three states:
Contracted (available in our Scale plan)- Coffee you've committed to purchasing but haven't received
Warehouse/Offsite - Coffee stored at your importer or another facility
In-house/Roastery - Coffee physically in your roastery ready for roasting
Coffee flows from contracted to warehouse to roastery.
Understanding these locations is essential because:
Only coffee in a roasting location is available in RoastLogger
Moving coffee between locations helps maintain accurate inventory tracking
Each location type has different capabilities and features
Your Inventory Dashboard
The main Inventory page provides a complete overview of your green coffee positions and usage rates. Here's what you'll see:
Current inventory levels across all locations
Value of your total coffee investment
Usage rates showing how quickly you're going through each coffee
Projected zero dates when you'll run out of each coffee
Visual indicators (yellow/red) for low or depleted coffees
The inventory dashboard gives you a quick overview of your entire coffee position.
Next Steps
Now that you understand the basics, you're ready to start setting up your inventory. In the next section, we'll walk through the process of adding your first coffees to the system.