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The short version

Every line item on an invoice you upload becomes a Vendor Item. It’s tied to a specific vendor — exactly what shows up on the bill. A Product is the broader, generic version of that item. It’s what you count in Inventory, use in Recipes, and track with Price Movers. Here’s a real-world example. Say you buy “Sysco Chicken Breast 10lb” from Sysco and “US Foods Boneless Chicken 8lb” from US Foods. Those are two separate Vendor Items from two different vendors. But in Garde, they both map to one Product: “Chicken Breast.” That means all your chicken purchases show up in a single place for inventory, recipes, and reporting — no matter who you bought from. Once a Vendor Item gets linked to a Product, Garde remembers. Every future invoice with that same Vendor Item maps to the same Product automatically. No extra work on your end. You can order Vendor Items from your vendors through Order Guides and set up Price Alerts to get notified when prices shift.

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Where can I review new Vendor Items?

Make the New Vendor Item Review part of your weekly routine. Five minutes of scanning catches items that were linked or categorized differently than you expected. It’s the single best way to prevent reporting headaches down the road.
Head to New Vendor Item Review to see how your latest vendor items have been coded. If something looks off, you can fix the Vendor Item-to-Product association right there. (Full walkthrough: How to fix a wrong association.) You can also use Invoice Approval to review invoices more broadly — checking Payment Accounts, invoice details, and vendor item coding all in one place.

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How does Garde categorize my products?

Our team members all have restaurant experience. They use system-wide data from thousands of restaurants to make smart coding decisions, looking at the Categories you already have set up and classifying items based on what they are — not how you use them. So if you upload an invoice with apples, we’ll code that to “Produce” or “Fruit” depending on your categories. We won’t code it to “Family Meal” or “Desserts” because only you know how you plan to use those apples.

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Can I code the same product to two different categories?

Each Vendor Item links to one Product, and each Product has one Category. So if limes are coded to Produce, every lime purchase lands in Produce. But there’s a workaround. You can set a Product to split proportionally across multiple Categories. For example: every time you purchase limes, 10% goes to “Bar Consumables” and 90% goes to “Produce.” Define a split that reflects your typical usage and you’re covered.

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Does Garde match ALL new vendor items to existing products?

Nope. We only do this for Food and Beverage items. Other purchases — expenses, disposables, paper goods, cleaning supplies — each get their own unique Product every time a new Vendor Item shows up.

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How do I fix it if something is wrong?

Follow the steps here: How to Fix a Vendor Item Associated with the Wrong Product