Choosing Your Factory Type

If your Business Type is set to Manufacturer, AskBiz can also record your Factory Type — a more specific classification of what you actually produce. This is a separate setting from Business Type: changing one never changes the other.

It's optional. You can skip it during onboarding and pick one later, or never pick one at all — an unset factory type doesn't block any capture, batch, quality, downtime, shift, or waybill feature. Everything in Factory Operations still works; you just get generic yield thresholds instead of ones calibrated to your specific production.

• Cooking Oil Pressing (sesame, groundnut, sunflower, or palm) — pressing seeds or fruit into oil. Yields vary hugely by seed, from around 18% for palm to over 70% for groundnut, and the press-cake left over is a sellable by-product, not waste.
• Packaged Drinking Water (sachet or bottled) — treating raw water and packaging it. Includes a required regulatory lab-test hold before any batch can be sold.
• Maize Milling (posho/flour mill) — grinding maize into flour at one of three grades. Each run produces two sellable products at once: the flour and the bran/germ removed alongside it.
• Cassava Processing (garri, fufu, or starch) — peeling, washing, and grating cassava, then branching into one of three different finished products, each with its own process and yield.
• Rice Milling / Parboiling — cleaning and milling paddy into rice, optionally parboiling it first, which significantly reduces breakage and raises the milled-rice yield. Parboiled paddy itself is a real, sellable stopping point.
• Dairy Processing (yoghurt, cheese, or ghee) — pasteurizing raw milk, then branching three ways. Yoghurt and ghee/butter are sellable the same day; cheese needs a genuine ripening period first.
• Bakery / Bread Production — mixing, proofing, and baking dough. Unsold stock ages out fast, so freshness tracking matters more here than in most other types.
• Soap / Detergent Making — combining oils/fats with lye, moulding, and curing. A batch is genuinely not sellable until several weeks of curing are complete.
• Concrete Block / Brick Making — mixing cement, sand, aggregate, and water, moulding, and curing blocks. Minimum cure is about a week; full design strength takes 28 days.
• Poultry Processing / Abattoir (broiler, turkey, duck, or goose) — slaughtering, defeathering, and eviscerating birds down to a dressed carcass, tracked as a percentage of live weight.
• Coffee Processing (wet/washed) — pulping, fermenting, washing, and drying cherry down to green beans. Dried parchment coffee is a real, separately-sellable stopping point along the way.
• Fish Smoking / Processing — cleaning and smoking fresh fish until it reaches a shelf-stable moisture level. Yield varies the most of any type here, so AskBiz encourages tracking your own average rather than relying on a generic figure.

There's also an Other option for anything not listed.

You're asked to pick a factory type once during onboarding, on a step shown only to the Manufacturer business type, right after you pick your sector. It's skippable.

To set or change it later, go to Settings → Localisation → Factory Settings in your AskBiz admin panel (askbiz.co, not the pos.askbiz.co staff terminal) and choose from the dropdown, then save. This setting lives alongside — but is completely separate from — the Business Type setting on the same page.

Picking a factory type now genuinely changes three things:

1. Yield ranges — your Efficiency KPI and Production log score your output against the expected yield range for your specific type and product (for example, sesame oil's normal range is roughly 33–63%), instead of one flat threshold applied to everyone. See Understanding Your Production Efficiency and Yield Range.

2. Automatic holds — for water, soap, concrete blocks, and dairy's cheese line specifically, a matching output or packaging capture automatically creates a not-yet-releasable hold with no extra input from you. See Not-Yet-Releasable Holds.

3. Automatic expiry — for bakery specifically, a matching output or packaging capture is automatically given a short sell-by window.

What it still doesn't do: change which capture buttons you see (every factory type uses the same five capture types), or show you a stage-by-stage checklist for your process — that reference data exists behind the scenes but isn't surfaced in the app yet.