Vendors & purchasing

The money going out: a vendor directory, and purchase orders with their deliveries and payments, so your costs sit next to your sales.

Both are under Purchasing in the sidebar. Vendors is the directory, and Spending lists purchases and expenses together, with a tab for each.

A purchase or an expense?

Raise a purchase when there's a bill with lines on it, something you're waiting for, or something that goes into stock. Receiving a purchase is what gives your materials a cost. For everything else (fuel, a subscription, postage) record an expense: one amount and a photo of the receipt.

Both use the same categories, so the spend reports and the year-end tax summary see them together.

Vendors

A supplier directory. Vendor details holds the name, company, email, phone, website, Account number, Payment terms, tags and the currency they bill in (a note for whoever orders; your purchases stay in your own currency). The Address, Notes and Custom fields cards hold the rest. Archive hides a vendor from pickers.

Delete vendor is only there for a vendor with no purchases. Once you've raised a purchase for someone, archive them instead: their purchases, payments and spending history stay where they are.

A vendor's page lists their 10 newest purchases, each with its total. Its Attachments card holds what belongs to the supplier rather than one order: a price list, a tax form, a supply agreement.

You edit a vendor's cards where you read them. Change something and a bar at the bottom offers Save and Discard. Save saves only the cards you changed. Emptying a box clears the stored value, and leaving with something unsaved asks first.

Import on the vendors list loads a vendor list from a CSV. See Importing your spreadsheet.

Purchases

A purchase is a purchase order or bill from a vendor:

• Lines with descriptions, quantities, unit prices and optional line discounts; an optional discount off the subtotal before tax; the tax each line was charged; and shipping. The totals are worked out for you. The number follows your format (PO-000001 by default), or type your own Purchase #.
• A Vendor reference (their invoice or order number), a category from your spend categories, order and expected dates, and notes.
• Statuses: Draft, Ordered, Partially received, Received, then Partially paid and Paid, with Canceled at any point. Receiving and paying set them as you go, and you can set any status by hand.

The purchase page

The number, status, dates and balance due are at the top, with Send, Print, Download PDF, Duplicate, Edit, Receive everything, Cancel purchase and Archive. Cancel purchase asks you to confirm first. A draft also has Mark ordered and Delete purchase, and there's a status picker. Edit is hidden on a paid or canceled purchase: remove the payments, or set the status back, to edit one. Duplicate copies the purchase into a new draft for the same vendor, ordered today, with its lines, discount, shipping, category, project and notes. Nothing is received on the copy, so stock doesn't move until you receive it. On the API it's POST /purchases/{id}/duplicate. Once everything is received, Receive everything becomes Undo every delivery.

The rest is on tabs:

• Receiving, where the page opens. The number beside it is how many lines are still to come.
• Details: what was ordered, the totals and any notes.
• Payments: what you've paid, and the form to record more.
• Attachments: the paperwork, with a count.
• History: every change, in order.

The tab is part of the address, so you can bookmark or share a purchase open on Payments.

Preferred vendors, and reordering from low stock

An item or material can list the vendors you buy it from, in the Vendors card on its Cost tab. Each row holds the vendor's own code for it (Their code), what they charge per unit they sell in (a bag, a case, a sheet), and how many of your units that holds.

Each purchase updates the price, the unit, the conversion and the date you last bought it: buy wax from Northwood at $4.20 a bag and the item remembers Northwood, $4.20, per bag. Their code is set by hand or by the materials import. The first vendor you buy an item from becomes its preferred vendor; the star on the card changes it.

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

• Draft a purchase, on the item's Stock card, raises a draft to the preferred vendor with the line filled in: the remembered price and unit, and a suggested quantity. That's the item's reorder quantity, or, without one, the reorder point less what's available, at least one purchase unit.
• Draft purchases for low stock, on Stock, does it for every open alert at once, one draft per vendor. Four low materials from one supplier become one purchase with four lines.

They're always drafts. Nothing is ordered until you check it and mark it ordered. The draft's history says it came from low stock and which items; its notes stay empty, because notes print on the purchase order your supplier gets. An item with no preferred vendor opens the purchase form with the line filled in and the vendor for you to choose.

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

What a line buys

A line can name an item: a product you're restocking or a material you're buying. For an item that tracks stock, receiving puts the goods on the shelf and moves its average cost. A line with no item, or an item that doesn't track stock, moves nothing.

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

Receiving

A purchase opens on Receiving. Its Receive card lists every line still to come, each filled in with what's outstanding. Change the numbers to what turned up, set Received on, add a note and press Record delivery. You can't receive more than is outstanding on a line. When the supplier sent more than you ordered, raise the line's quantity on the purchase first, then receive.

Partial deliveries are normal: record each one as it comes and the purchase moves to Partially received, then Received when every line is complete. Receive everything does it in one go.

Each delivery is listed under Deliveries, and Undo reverses it: the stock comes back off the shelf at the cost it came in at, and the purchase goes back to what the other deliveries make it.

Correcting a delivery

Edit on a delivery changes its date, its note, or how much of each line came, without undoing the whole delivery. Lower a line and the difference leaves the shelf at what it came in at; raise it, as far as the line still has outstanding, and the extra comes in at what the line lands at today. Set a line to 0 to take it off the delivery, and a delivery with nothing left on it goes.

Changing a price, the freight, the discount or Carry freight and tax into unit cost on a purchase after a delivery restates what the goods landed at. The value of what's still on hand from it moves to the new cost, so the item's average cost follows, and the purchase's History says what changed. Goods already sold or used keep the cost they left at.

Editing a purchase after a delivery

Editing a purchase keeps its deliveries. A line something was received against stays on the purchase, keeps its item and unit, and its quantity can't go below what arrived: with 4 received, the quantity can be 4 or more. Raise it and the rest shows as outstanding again; lower it to what arrived and the line is complete. To take a received line off, undo its delivery first.

Counting a delivery in

The quantities are filled in because most deliveries match the order. When one doesn't, count it: tick Count it in and every line drops to zero, and each scan adds one, up to what's outstanding on the line. What you end up with is what you handled, so a short delivery shows up on the bench. Scanning without ticking the box starts the count by itself.

A USB or Bluetooth scanner needs no setup. The camera button beside the box uses the phone. Codes are matched against the item's barcode, then its SKU. See barcodes and labels.

What the goods cost

Receiving values stock at its landed cost, not only the line price. With Carry freight and tax into unit cost ticked on the purchase (it is by default), the freight, and any tax on the freight, is spread across the lines by value: a $30 delivery charge on a $75 line and a $25 line adds $22.50 and $7.50. Each line's own tax stays with that line. A discount 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 units.

That figure goes into the item's average cost, so your margins follow the prices you pay. Untick the box to leave freight and tax out of the unit cost.

An item nobody costed by hand takes the average as its cost on its first delivery. An item you costed yourself keeps your figure, with the average from purchases beside it.

What the order prints

A purchase order prints your purchase order terms after its lines, copied from Company Settings → Documents → Signatures and terms when the order is raised. If that's blank, nothing prints. It has its own footer too, when one is set under Documents, or the shared footer.

Sending a purchase order

Send emails the purchase order to your supplier as a PDF with your letterhead and design, subject "Purchase order PO-000012 from Your Company", with an optional note. Each line starts with your item number, so the supplier can match it to what you buy. Sending a draft marks it ordered. Print opens a print view and Download PDF saves the same PDF the supplier gets. The History tab records who it went to.

Attachments

The Attachments tab holds the paperwork for that order: the supplier's quote, their invoice, the packing slip from the box.

Paying for a purchase

Record what you paid on the Payments tab: amount, method, date, a Reference such as the check number, and a Note. Both show on the payment's row. The purchase becomes Partially paid or Paid and shows its balance due. Paid wins over received, so a paid purchase stays Paid after the delivery arrives, and removing the last payment puts it back to its receiving status. Unpaid purchases show on the dashboard, and purchases feed the expense and cash-flow widgets.

On the purchases list, Delivery → Awaiting receipt shows everything ordered and not yet received in full.

Every change is on the purchase's History tab. The vendor's History card records changes to the vendor itself. See Activity & history.

Purchases are unlimited on every plan

Purchasing isn't counted on either plan. The only thing metered is invoices, and only on Free. See Plans & billing.