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 limit or change any capture, batch, quality, downtime, shift, or waybill feature. Everything in Factory Operations works the same regardless.

• 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.
• 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 (about a day), 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.

Right now, picking a factory type simply records which of the 12 categories (or Other) your business is, on your business profile. It does not currently change your capture buttons, add stage-specific checklists to the app, or pre-fill any yield/recipe figures for you — every factory still uses the same four capture types and the same Batch, Quality, Downtime, Shift, and Waybill tools described elsewhere in Factory Operations, regardless of which type you pick.

UNVERIFIED: whether or how soon type-specific stage guidance and suggested yield recipes will appear in the app — the underlying reference data (typical production stages and expected yield ranges per type) exists, but nothing in the product surfaces it to you yet.