Vendors & purchasing

The money-out side: a vendor directory and internal purchase orders with payments, so costs live next to revenue.

Both live under Purchasing in the sidebar: Vendors is the directory, and Spending is purchases and expenses in one list, with a tab for each on its own.

A purchase or an expense?

Raise a purchase when there is a bill with lines on it, something you are waiting to arrive, or something that lands in stock — receiving a purchase is what gives your materials a cost. For everything else — fuel, a subscription, postage — record an expense instead: one amount, one photograph, ten seconds.

Both file under the same categories, so the spend reports and the year-end tax summary see the two as one picture rather than two halves.

Vendors

A lightweight supplier directory — name, company, email, phone, website, address, notes and tags, plus the currency they bill in (a note for whoever raises the order; your purchases stay in your own currency). Vendors can be archived (hidden from pickers) and each vendor page rolls up its purchase history and totals.

Vendors have an Attachments card too, for the things that belong to the supplier rather than to one order: a price list, a tax form, a signed supply agreement.

There is no Edit screen for a vendor: the page is one scroll, and the Vendor details, Address and Notes cards on it are editable where you read them. Each carries its own Save and saves only its own fields, says Saved. beside that button, and leaves you where you were. Emptying a box clears the stored value, and starting to type in a card and then navigating away asks first.

Purchases

A purchase is an internal PO or bill raised against a vendor:

• Lines with descriptions, quantities, unit prices and optional line discounts; an optional document discount off the subtotal before tax; the tax each line was charged, and shipping; totals computed for you. Numbers follow your configured format (default PO-000001), or type your own Purchase # on the form.
• A reference (the vendor's invoice/PO number), a category from your shared spend category list, order and expected dates, and notes.
• Statuses: Draft → Ordered → Partially received → Received, with the payment states after them and Cancelled available at any point. The receiving states follow the deliveries you book in; you can still set any status by hand.

The purchase page

The number, the status, the dates and the balance due sit at the top, along with Email, Edit, Receive everything, Cancel and Archive. Everything else is on tabs:

• Receiving — where the page opens, because a box turning up is the usual reason to be here. The number beside it is how many lines are still owed.
• Details — what was ordered, with the totals and any notes.
• Payments — what has been paid out, and the box to record more.
• Files — the paperwork, with a count.
• History — every change, in order.

The tab is part of the address, so a purchase open on Payments can be bookmarked or sent to somebody as it stands. Only the tab you are looking at is loaded.

Preferred vendors, and reordering from low stock

An item or material can carry the vendors you buy it from — open the item and look for the Vendors card. Each row remembers the vendor's own code for it, what they charge per unit they sell in (a bag, a case, a sheet), and how many of your units that holds. Every purchase fills this in for you: buy 200 g of wax from Northwood at $4.20 a bag and the item now remembers Northwood, $4.20, per bag. The first vendor an item is ever bought from becomes its preferred one; change that with the star on the card.

That is what makes a low-stock alert one click from a purchase:

• On the item's Stock card, Draft a purchase raises a draft to the preferred vendor with the line filled in — the remembered price and unit, and a suggested quantity: the item's reorder quantity if it has one, otherwise what it takes to get back above the reorder point, in whole purchase units.
• On Inventory, Draft purchases for low stock does it for every open alert at once, one draft per vendor. Four low materials from the same supplier become one four-line purchase, not four.

They are always drafts. Nothing is ordered until you open it, check it and say so — the suggestion is a starting point, not a decision. An item with no preferred vendor cannot be drafted on its own; you land on the purchase form with the line already filled in and the vendor left for you to choose, and choosing one remembers it.

The materials import takes Vendor and Vendor code columns and sets the preferred vendor from them, creating a vendor you don't have yet by name.

What a line buys

Each line can name an item — a product you are restocking or a material you are buying in. That link is what makes receiving mean something: the goods land in stock, and what you paid moves the item's average cost. A line with no item (rent, a repair, a software subscription) is simply an expense.

Suppliers rarely sell in the unit you count in, so a line also carries the unit bought and how many of your units one of them holds. A 1,000 g bag of wax is one "bag" with 1000 in the box beside it: order 2 bags and receiving them adds 2,000 g of wax to stock.

Receiving

Open a purchase and it lands on Receiving, where Receive books a delivery in. Every line still owed shows with a box pre-filled with what is outstanding — change the numbers to what actually turned up, date it, add a note, and save. Partial deliveries are normal: book each drop as it arrives and the purchase moves to Partially received, then Received once every line is complete. Receive everything is the shortcut for when it all came at once.

Each delivery is listed under Deliveries and can be undone: the stock it added comes back out and the purchase returns to whatever the remaining deliveries make it.

Counting a delivery in

Pre-filling each line with what is outstanding is right when the delivery matches the order, which is most of the time. It is exactly wrong when it does not — and that is the one occasion anybody reaches for a scanner.

So tick Count it in: every line drops to nothing and each scan adds one, up to what was ordered. What you end up with is what you actually touched, and a short delivery is discovered on the bench rather than three weeks later when the stock will not add up. Picking the scanner up halfway through starts the count on its own, so there is no box to clear by hand first.

A USB or Bluetooth scanner needs no setting up; the camera button beside the toggle uses the phone. Codes are matched against the item's barcode and then its SKU — see barcodes and labels.

What the goods actually cost

Receiving values the stock at what it landed at, not just the line price. By default the freight and tax on the order are spread across the lines in proportion to their value, so a $30 delivery charge on a $75 and a $25 line adds $22.50 and $7.50 respectively. Any discount you took off the whole order comes off too. The result, divided by the quantity, is the line's landed unit cost — and divided again by the conversion above, the cost of one of your own units.

That figure is what goes into the item's weighted-average cost, so as prices move your margins follow. Untick Carry freight and tax into unit cost on the purchase form if you would rather expense freight separately.

An item nobody has costed by hand adopts the average as its unit cost the first time it is received. An item you priced yourself keeps your figure, and the item page shows the average from purchases beside it.

What the order prints

A purchase order prints the workspace's purchase order terms after its lines, copied from Company Settings → Documents → Signatures and terms as the order is raised. Blank there prints nothing: the terms you give a customer are not the ones your wax supplier needs to read. It carries its own footer too, when one is set under Documents, else the shared one.

Emailing a purchase order

Email sends the purchase order to your supplier — the same themed PDF and letterhead your quotes and invoices use, subject "Purchase order PO-000012 from ", with an optional covering note. Sending a draft moves it to Ordered. Who it went to and what was on it is recorded in the purchase's History.

Attachments

Purchases carry a Files tab for the paperwork that belongs to that order: the supplier's quote, their invoice, the packing slip that came in the box.

Purchase payments

Record money paid out against a purchase on its Payments tab (amount, method, reference, date). The purchase derives Partially paid / Paid automatically and shows its balance due — money outranks goods, so a paid purchase stays Paid even after the delivery lands, and removing the last payment drops it back to where receiving left it. Unpaid purchases surface on the dashboard, and purchases feed the expense and cash-flow widgets.

Filter the purchases list by awaiting receipt to see everything you have placed with suppliers and not yet had in full.

Every change is recorded on the purchase's History tab and the vendor's History card — see Activity & history.

Purchases are unlimited on every plan

Nothing about purchasing is counted — the only thing either plan meters is invoices raised, and only on Free. Record every bill and every material cost you like: knowing what a project cost you is the point, and we're not going to meter it. See Plans & billing.