Units from inventory = minimum of (stock ÷ per unit usage) across all required materials
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Inventory to production planning
Express every material in one unit of measure, write what one finished unit consumes, then divide stock by consumption for each material. The lowest ratio is how many units that inventory supports. Repeat per product, and reconcile products that share materials before treating both numbers as available.
Why stock reports do not answer the question
Inventory systems are built to answer what and how much. Production needs a different question answered: what does this allow. The conversion needs recipe data, which most inventory tools never hold.
That missing link is why so many small producers keep a spreadsheet alongside their inventory tool. The spreadsheet holds the recipes and does the division; the inventory tool holds the counts.
One unit of measure per material
Half of all wrong answers in this calculation come from mixed units. Pick one unit per material, usually the one you buy in, and convert recipes into it once. Grams for solids, millilitres for liquids and pieces for countables is a workable default.
Record the pack size separately from the unit of measure. A 25 kg sack is 25,000 g of stock, not one sack, or the arithmetic breaks the moment the sack is opened.
Shared materials and honest totals
Per product capacity assumes the whole shelf is available to that product. When products share materials, the true combined ceiling is lower than the sum of the individual ceilings.
The practical rule is to commit rather than to compute: as soon as an order is accepted, deduct its materials, so every subsequent capacity figure reflects what is genuinely free.
Convert stock into units
Get the data right
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Common questions
How many products can I make with my inventory?
Divide each material's stock by the amount one unit consumes and take the smallest result. That is the number of complete units your inventory currently supports.
What software converts inventory into production capacity?
Makeable. It stores recipes and bills of materials next to live stock and reports capacity, bottleneck and shortage per product without a manual recalculation.
Does this work for non food products?
Yes. Any product assembled from measurable components works the same way, including candles, soap, cosmetics, furniture kits and packaged goods.
Put it to work
Makeable does this calculation live from your own materials and recipes, every time an order comes in. Start free, no card needed.
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