Best data structure for 2 linked apps

[yoroshiku]

Hello, newbie here

I am working on 2 apps for my restaurant, but i am not sure how to efficiently structure the data. I have :

• Inventory : listing hundreds of ingredients (price, quantity etc…)
• Recipe book : listing dozens of recipes, each containing dozens of ingredients from the Inventory

For the Inventory, i think the data can come from a single large Google worksheet.
For the Recipe book, I am not sure. Should i go with : one worksheet to index all the recipes listing, then one worksheet per detailed recipe ?

How to handle that many worksheet ? I wonder about the loading speed… because each recipe will have a lot of data : multiple ingredients, weight, inventory units, converted unit, yields, adjusted prices, 3 different profit & margin calculation methods, etc…

Is there a more efficient data structure ? such as MySQL database (with which i am not familiar with) ?

Does someone have a similar example ?
Thanks

[Aleksi]

Using two tables in one app is a good approach. For example if you have ingredient’s prices in inventory table, you can calculate recipe’s total price with a virtual column so if the ingredient’s price changes, it will update the recipe’s price as well. This is what I have used with two different restaurant apps.

[yoroshiku]

Thanks for your reply.
What about DB ? Whats the benefit over regular tablesheets ?

[Aleksi]

SQL is not needed… spreadsheet is just fine.
You actually need 3 tables for your app… Inventory, Receipts and Incredients.
#1 - Receipt is a parent table where the Incredients are child records
#2 - Inventory is a parent as well where the Inredients are childs as well.

[yoroshiku]

Ok thanks… I am still documenting myself as i am not familiar with the topic.

One important detail : i need some of my recipes to become ingredients, so i can reuse them inside other recipes. For example i have a “tomato sauce” recipe, made with ingredients “tomatoes, onions, garlic, whatever”. And then i make another “lasagna” recipe, made with previous “tomato sauce” and other stuffs like meat and fillings. Can this parent-child relation be done in a dynamic way in Appsheet (i.e when i update my tomato recipe, i need the lasagna to be updated as well )?

[Tess1]

thank you for starting this thread - and I hope that you and your biz are doing alright during this time. I have an online bakery and I’m in the midst of pivoting my model for these times.

After demo-ing every inventory & recipe management platform on the market - I have realized that I have to build my own. I am new to all of this, and it looked like you are/were too. I was just wondering if you have successfully created this app.

If yes, do you mind sharing any articles and/or threads that helped you out?
I am also worried about the amount of data that would be stored on this app, if yours is running, do you have any trouble loading data?

Thanks for your time!

[Aleksi]

Yes you can do that if you add an extra Ref field to your Recipe table because you can read records from the same table.