What is a Blueprint?
A Blueprint in Stash is a bill of materials for something you sell. It tells Stash which items to deduct from your inventory whenever a finished product is sold through your POS. Some teams call them recipes, BoMs, kits, or bundle definitions — they all do the same thing.
Every time you sell the finished product, Stash deducts the right amount of each component automatically. No spreadsheets, no manual stock counts, no end-of-month surprises.
What kinds of products use Blueprints?
Anything made from one or more components you also stock as inventory:
Café drinks — a Cappuccino made from coffee beans, milk, and a paper cup
Restaurant dishes — a burger made from a bun, patty, cheese, sauce, and fries
Cocktails — a Negroni made from gin, Campari, and vermouth
Retail bundles — a starter kit made from three different products bundled at one price
Gift boxes — a holiday box containing a candle, a notebook, and a card
Pre-packed combos — a meal deal with sandwich + drink + chips
Assembly kits — a furniture flatpack made from multiple parts
If a finished product is made from at least one inventory item, it can have a Blueprint.
What's inside a Blueprint?
Every Blueprint has:
Name — what you call the finished product (ideally matches the POS product name)
Location — which shop the components live at
Makes — yield. 1 Serving for single-unit products, or batch sizes like 12 Muffins or 2 Liter for batch production
Components — the list of inventory items used, with how much of each
POS link (optional but powerful) — connects to your POS product so sales trigger deductions automatically. See Linking a Blueprint to a POS product.
What's the difference between a Blueprint and an inventory item?
Inventory items are what you stock and count — bags of beans, bottles of milk, individual candles.
Blueprints are what you sell — finished products made from those items.
You don't track stock on a Blueprint directly. Stock lives on the underlying components. The Blueprint is the bridge that says "when this is sold, deduct this much of these components."
Why use Blueprints instead of just tracking the finished product?
If you only track finished products, you have two problems:
You can't see component-level stock. If five different drinks all use milk, tracking them as separate finished products won't tell you when milk is running low.
You'd have to manually update stock all day. Every coffee sale, every burger, every gift box would need someone to remember to subtract.
Blueprints solve both. You stock your components, you build Blueprints once, and the closed loop with your POS handles the rest.
How Blueprints connect to your POS
This is the key automation. When you connect Square, SumUp, or Odoo, Stash imports your POS products. You then link each POS product to its Blueprint. From that point on:
Customer buys a Cappuccino at the till
Your POS records the sale and pings Stash
Stash looks up the Cappuccino's Blueprint
Stash deducts 18g of beans, 150ml of milk, and 1 cup from inventory
You don't lift a finger
Multiply that across hundreds of sales a day, and Stash quietly keeps your stock numbers accurate while you focus on running the business. See How POS sales deduct stock automatically.
Where to start
Build Blueprints for your top-selling items first — the ones that drive the most stock movement. Once those are in place, the rest can wait.
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