Setting up your products in nouz — COGS, margin, the things to get right first.
To set up a product with COGS correctly: enter the sale price the customer pays, then enter the unit cost to you (broken into ingredients if it's prepared on-site), and tag the category. Everything downstream — daily EBIT, weekly margin, statistics — runs off those two numbers. Here's the walkthrough.
Almost every margin problem we untangle for new nouz customers traces back to a product entry made in the first week. A misread coffee dose. A milk price that came up 12% and never got updated. A retail SKU tagged as a service. None of them are dramatic on day one; all of them quietly bend the reporting for months. This walkthrough is the antidote.
Two products takes about three minutes once you know the form. The first one is slower because you're thinking about the shape — that's normal. Below: the form, the decisions, the errors to dodge.
Why the first product matters more than you think
Every revenue line on your daily P&L is a sum of product snapshots. Today's margin is "what you sold today × what each thing cost when you sold it." If the underlying product setup is 8% off, the daily margin is 8% off — every day, until you fix it. The system has no other way to know.
This is why getting the first five products right is more leveraged than getting the next fifty. Your top sellers carry 70–80% of revenue. A 5% error on a top seller is bigger than a 30% error on something you sell twice a week.
The form, field by field
Open the products screen and click "new product." Six fields, in order.
| Field | What to enter | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| Name | What you call it day-to-day on the menu or tag | Internal SKU codes that no one else recognises |
| Category | Food, drink, retail, service, etc. | Leaving as "other" — you lose grouping in stats |
| Sale price | What the customer pays, including VAT | Entering ex-VAT — every European VAT regime breaks here |
| Unit COGS | What it costs YOU to make/buy one unit | Using the supplier invoice line as-is, no portion size |
| Type | Product sale or service | Tagging a haircut as "product" — corrupts revenue grouping |
| Ingredient breakdown (optional) | Sub-recipe for prepared items | Skipping for things you actually prep |
When to break into ingredients (and when not to)
The ingredient breakdown is the field new owners over-use. The rule we give in onboarding calls: break it down if the COGS changes when an input price changes — and skip it if the COGS is what you pay for one finished unit.
- Break it down: a cappuccino (18g beans, 150ml milk, paper cup, sugar sachet), a sandwich (bread, ham, cheese, butter), a hair colour (toner, foils, gloves).
- Don't break it down: a bag of beans you sell on the shelf (one wholesale cost, one shelf price), a styling product retailed unopened, a wine bottle sold as-is.
For the broken-down products, you enter each ingredient once at its unit cost (e.g. "milk: €1.20/L"), then specify the portion used in each recipe ("cappuccino uses 0.15L milk"). When the milk supplier raises prices, you update the ingredient once and every product that uses milk re-prices its COGS automatically. Full walkthrough here.
Three errors that quietly distort margin reporting
After three years of debugging product setups with new owners, these three errors account for roughly 80% of "my margin looks wrong" tickets.
1. Portion size off by a factor
A barista weighs a coffee dose at 18g, but the COGS was set assuming 16g. That's a 12.5% error on the bean cost — about €0.04 per coffee. Sells 200 a day: €8 a day, €240 a month, €2,880 a year of "missing" cost. The fix: weigh ten doses at the start of week one and use the average.
2. Forgetting waste in the COGS
A sandwich uses 80g of ham, but you slice the ham in 100g portions and the last 20g is too thin to use. The real COGS-per-sandwich is 100g of ham, not 80g. Many owners enter 80g and silently under-report COGS by 20%. Tag the waste into the ingredient portion, not as a separate "waste" line.
3. Sale price entered ex-VAT
On the menu: €3.80. In the form: €3.80. Correct. The mistake is entering €3.17 (the ex-VAT figure your accountant uses) and assuming "the system will handle the VAT." It will, but it'll do it on top of your ex-VAT entry and your reported revenue will be 16% lower than reality.
I set up my full menu in one Sunday and three of my best-sellers had a portion error baked in. I caught it at the end of week two when the EBIT looked optimistic and I knew the trading week had been tight. Two minutes to fix, three hours of detective work to find. Now I weigh the dose on day one.
When the supplier price changes (and what to do)
Supplier prices move. Coffee beans tick up in February, milk drops in June, the local fruit-and-veg fluctuates weekly. The temptation is to leave the old COGS in place "until it stabilises." Don't — update it the day the invoice arrives. Here's the workflow:
- 01Invoice arrives.
Note the new per-unit price. (Per kg, per litre, per case — whatever the underlying measure is.)
- 02Open the ingredient.
In the products screen, find the ingredient (e.g. "espresso beans"), open the edit form.
- 03Update the unit cost.
Save. Every product that uses this ingredient re-prices its COGS from today forward.
- 04Don't backfill.
Past entries keep the old snapshot — see why nouz snapshots COGS at sale. Historical margin stays historically accurate.
If you're running on a spreadsheet, this whole walkthrough collapses into "update the COGS column manually for every affected SKU" — tedious but possible. Read the help-centre setup page for the in-app version, or jump to the snapshot logic post if you're wondering why historical margin doesn't change when you update a price.
FAQ
How many products should I set up in week one?
Your top 80% of revenue, by gut. For a café that's typically 12–18 items. For a retailer, 40–60 SKUs. For a salon, the full service menu plus the retail products you actively move. The long tail goes in during week 2 and 3.
What if I sell something with no clean COGS — like a workshop or an event?
Enter the direct out-of-pocket cost as COGS (materials, the rented projector, the catering). Leave staff time out — that lands in fixed costs as part of payroll. The workshop's margin will look high; that's correct, because the labour is already paid for whether or not the workshop happens.
Can two staff members enter products simultaneously without conflict?
Yes — the products screen is multi-user safe. Most owners don't need this, but if you're onboarding with a manager, splitting the menu in half can cut setup time roughly in half too.
What happens to past sales if I edit a product's sale price?
Nothing — past entries are snapshots, locked at the value they were sold at. Only future sales pick up the new price. Same for COGS edits. This is the core of how snapshots work.
Do I need to enter every ingredient as a separate item, or can I just lump "coffee bar inputs" into one COGS line?
You can lump if you're comfortable losing the ingredient-level updating. Most cafés we work with start lumped in week 1 and break things out gradually over the first month as supplier prices start to move.