Docs / Setup

Setup

This guide takes you step by step through setting up Spicy for your restaurant. Work through the steps in order. Later steps depend on earlier ones.

Allow about an hour the first time. If you have a problem, Troubleshooting answers the common ones.

Step 1: Restaurant details

Go to Settings → Restaurant settings.

• Company — your restaurant's name. It prints on your receipts.
• Invoice series prefix — the letters that start your invoice numbers. The default REST- is fine to keep.
• Address — your restaurant's address.

Step 2: Warehouses

Go to Inventory → Warehouses. Spicy needs three, and they must be different from each other:

• Store — where deliveries arrive before you move them.
• Kitchen — where you keep your food ingredients.
• Bar — where you keep your drinks. This is the one Spicy deducts from when you sell a drink.

Return to Settings → Restaurant settings and set Central Store warehouse and Bar / POS warehouse to match.

Step 3: Units and item groups

Go to Inventory overview. Add the units you count stock in — Bottle, Carton, Kg, Bag, Plate, Piece. Keep the list short and use the same ones every time.

On the same page, create your item groups. These are the categories your staff see on the POS screen. Choose based on how your staff think about your menu: Starters, Mains, Drinks, Sides, Desserts.

Step 4: Items

Go to Inventory → Items. This is where you build your menu. Every item needs a name, a group, a unit, and a type — Food or Drinks. It also needs the three checkboxes that decide how Spicy treats it.

Drinks

Tick all three: Sell this item, Track stock levels, and Buy this item. Spicy counts and deducts drinks automatically when you sell them.

Example: one drink you sell.

Item name: Coca-Cola 50cl
Group: Drinks
Unit: Bottle
Department: Drinks
[✓] Sell this item
[✓] Track stock levels
[✓] Buy this item

Dishes you sell

Tick Sell this item only. Do not tick Track stock levels.

Why: you never receive "jollof rice" into a warehouse. You receive rice, oil, tomato, and chicken. The dish is a recipe made from those ingredients, and Spicy costs it from your kitchen count.

Item name: Jollof Rice
Group: Mains
Unit: Plate
Department: Food
[✓] Sell this item
[ ] Track stock levels
[ ] Buy this item

Ingredients

Tick Track stock levels and Buy this item. Leave Sell this item unticked. You buy these and count them, but nobody orders them from the menu.

Item name: Rice
Group: Ingredients
Unit: Kg
Department: Food
[ ] Sell this item
[✓] Track stock levels
[✓] Buy this item

Pause this item hides an item from new orders and purchases without deleting it. Useful for a dish that is off the menu for a while.

Step 5: Bulk buying

If you buy drinks by the crate or ingredients by the bag, add a conversion on the item. Open Inventory → Items and open the item. Add a conversion — for example, 1 Crate = 24 Bottles.

You can then receive 5 crates on a receipt. Spicy calculates that you received 120 bottles. It also calculates the cost per bottle for you. The conversion only applies when receiving stock. Selling one drink always deducts one bottle.

Step 6: Recipes

The Use variants option turns a dish into a template for sizes. Spicy does not sell or stock the template itself, only its sizes. See Step 8.

For each dish you sell, add a Recipe listing what goes into it. You can do this from the item, or manage them all at once under Inventory → Recipes.

One recipe per dish, in the ingredient's own unit. A jollof rice recipe might be 0.125 kg rice, 0.03 kg oil, and so on.

Recipes do two things. They show you what a portion should cost, and they let Spicy compare what you should have used against what the kitchen actually used. That difference is one of the most useful numbers Spicy gives you. A big gap usually means over-preparation or waste that nobody wrote down.

Step 7: Your menu and prices

Go to Menu → Menus and create a menu. Add each dish and drink you sell, with the price the customer pays.

• Leave the price blank and Spicy fills it from your last purchase price.
• Special dish puts an item under a quick filter on the POS for featured dishes.
• Disabled hides an item from the POS without deleting its price. Use it when you run out of a dish.

Then go to Settings → Restaurant settings and set this as your Active menu. The POS only shows the active menu.

Step 8: Sizes and add-ons

Sizes. If you sell chicken in quarter, half, and full, make the dish a template with sizes. Create Quarter, Half, and Full as their own items with their own prices, then link them under the parent dish. On the POS the dish appears as one tile with the range "₦1,200 – ₦3,500". The cashier picks the size.

Add-ons. "Extra cheese" is its own item with its own price, linked to the dish it belongs to. It appears as a separate line on the bill, at its own price.

Both work the same way: a separate item with a separate price, linked to a parent.

Step 9: Payment methods

Go to Payments in the back office. Spicy includes Cash, Bank Transfer, Card, and USSD / Mobile Money from the start.

• Cash is the only type that can give change. You can only use one cash method per shift.
• Disable any method you do not accept.

Each method needs an account — the ledger account that receives its money. Without an account, Spicy will refuse to accept that method at the till. Open the method, pick an account under GL mappings, and save. Cash should use your Cash Account. Each electronic method can have its own account if you want to see them separately.

Step 10: Kitchen and bar

Go to Settings → Production units. These are your stations, and Spicy routes tickets between them.

• Kitchen — department Food, warehouse Kitchen.
• Bar — department Drinks, warehouse Bar.

On each one, set:

• Income account — where Spicy records that department's sales. Kitchen should point at Food Sales, and Bar should point at Drinks Sales. These settings let Spicy report food and drinks separately.
• Sales returns account — where Spicy records refunds for that department.
• Expense account — where Spicy records that department's costs.

Then add the printer for that station: its IP address, paper width, and cut mode. Tick the box to print tickets for this station. If your bar does not need a ticket on takeaways, use the Block takeaway KOT option.

Step 11: Opening stock

You need stock in the system before you can sell. Go to Inventory → Reconciliations and create one per warehouse.

• Store — reason Opening Stock. Enter what you have and what you paid per unit.
• Kitchen — same, for your ingredients.
• Bar — same, for your drinks.

Opening Stock only works on a warehouse that never had stock before. If you need to correct one later, use Adjustment instead.

After this, move stock from the Store to the Kitchen and Bar using Inventory → Stock entries with purpose Material Transfer.

As deliveries come in, use Purchase receipts for anything the supplier will invoice you for. For market buys you pay for on the spot, use Stock entries with purpose Material Receipt. See Inventory.

Step 12: Trading day

Go to Reports → P&L settings. This sets the rules the daily profit and loss statement follows.

• Business day start hour — if you close after midnight, set this to when you open. If you open at 7am and close at 3am, set it to 7. That way a 1am sale counts for the previous evening's trading.
• Electricity rate and daily depreciation — whatever you want to carry on the profit and loss.

Now add your recurring expenses: rent, salaries, and anything else you want to see each day. Mark each as direct or indirect, and daily or monthly. Spicy spreads monthly amounts across the days of the month.

Step 13: Staff accounts

An administrator creates the accounts. Go to Settings → User roles in the back office.

• Add user — create a login for each person.
• Assign role — Cashier, Manager, or Administrator.

Each person then signs in and sees the right screen: cashiers see the POS, and managers see the back office.

When someone leaves, deactivate their account. Their name stays on the orders and shifts they worked, which matters when you check a figure months later.

Step 14: Take a backup

Before you process a single real order:

make backup

Check that the files appear in the backups folder. Then arrange for this command to run every night.

You're set

Next steps:

• POS — how your cashier works the counter.
• Menu — managing items and prices day to day.
• Inventory — receiving stock, transfers, and counts.
• Reports — reading your daily profit and loss.