Purchasing
The whole buying side in one place — what's low, your orders, every purchase you've recorded, and who you buy from.
Purchasing is everything on the buying side of Inventory, on one page with four tabs. This article is the overview — what each tab is for. Creating, sending and receiving an order each have their own short article.
Note
Inventory must be switched on for your account for this to appear.
Open Purchasing
From the sidebar, open Inventory → Purchasing. Running more than one location? A Location picker sits at the top of the page, above the tabs. It stays in the same place whichever tab you're on, and it scopes the To buy list to that location's counts and par levels — orders you create belong to that location too. With a single location there is no picker.
Below the picker are the four tabs: To buy, Orders, Purchase log
and Suppliers. Each tab is its own web address, so you can bookmark the
one you use most or paste it to someone else — the address ends in
?tab=orders, ?tab=log and so on.
To buy
A par level is the minimum amount of an ingredient you want to keep in stock. When your count falls at or below par, the ingredient appears on the To buy list, grouped under the supplier who sells it to you cheapest. Par levels are what drive this list — with none set, there is nothing to reorder. You set them under Stock levels.
Each supplier group has a Create order button that turns the whole group into a purchase order. To order only some of the lines, tick them and use Create order from selected in the bar that appears — you get an order with exactly the ticked lines on it. Export downloads that supplier's list; Download to-buy list in the header menu downloads every supplier at once.
The Pack price column shows each supplier's price for one pack. Where a supplier has no price set, it shows the ingredient's own cost for a pack instead, marked product cost, so a list with no supplier prices still has numbers on it. That figure is not copied onto the order: an order only carries the prices a supplier actually has, so receiving it never overwrites the ingredient's cost with an estimate.
Note
If you've divided a location into areas, the To buy list adds them up: it is based on everything the site holds — every area's counts and pars together — so stock sitting in the cellar never gets re-ordered.
Orders
Every purchase order you've raised — draft, sent, received and cancelled.
Each row shows its status as a word, the supplier, what's on it, and the date
it was created. Click a row to open the order, where you tick off what
actually turned up line by line — a short delivery leaves the order open for
the rest. Send and Receive stay on the row as the "it all came"
shortcut; Cancel order is in the row's … menu and asks you to confirm.
See Receive a purchase order
and Purchase-order statuses.
Purchase log
Everything you have actually bought, newest first. Each row carries a Source badge saying where it came from:
- Order — written automatically when you received a purchase order.
- Receipt — imported from a supplier receipt you scanned.
- Logged — you typed it in yourself with Log a purchase.
Only a row you logged yourself can be removed, from its … menu. An Order or
Receipt row is the record of a real delivery that also moved your stock, so it
stays. Removing a logged row also puts the ingredient's unit cost back to
whatever your previous purchase recorded.
Log a purchase
Log a purchase is in the header menu at the top of the page. It records something you have already bought — it does not place an order and it tells your supplier nothing. Use it when a rep drops something off, or for a cash-and-carry run.
Note
Enter the price of the thing you actually buy. If the ingredient has a container set — a keg, a bottle, a case — the form asks for kegs and cost per keg, and does the sums for you. The line under the price field shows exactly what will be stored. Your ingredient cost is always held per millilitre, gram or item, so your margins stay right.
Very cheap-per-millilitre things now record properly. A £95 keg works out at less than a penny per millilitre, and until recently there was nowhere to put a figure that small — the form said so, and left the ingredient's cost alone rather than record a wrong one. Kegs, cases and big bottles now store their real cost to the millilitre, so the margin on a pint is right the first time. Nothing is displayed differently: prices still show in pounds and pence. If an ingredient of yours has been sitting with no cost for this reason, log one purchase of it at the price you pay and it will pick the cost up.
Suppliers
Who you buy from, and what you spend with them. The top half is your supplier list — contacts, how many products each supplies, and what you've spent. Click one to open it and edit its details, product codes and prices; see Suppliers.
The bottom half is Spend: every purchase you've recorded, totalled by the supplier name written on it, plus a month-by-month breakdown. Spend is worked out from your purchase log only, so a received order is counted once — on the day you received it.
What's next
- Create a purchase order — turn To buy rows into a draft order.
- Send a purchase order — mark a draft as placed with the supplier.
- Receive a purchase order — top your stock up when the delivery arrives.
- Purchase-order statuses — draft, sent, received, cancelled.
- Stock levels — set the par levels that drive the To buy list.
- Suppliers — product codes, pack sizes and the unit cost used here.
- Purchasing troubleshooting · Inventory FAQ.