Purchase item quantity and unit costs

Generally have to say a big thumbs up. Having had a little play I like what I see, find it simple to use and as someone who isn’t an accountant, but has a basic knowledge, I should be able to look after my new business for a while without having to engage an accountant.

As a new user, I note that we have unit cost when invoicing but not when purchasing (unless I’m missing something).
There’s talk about adding inventory/stock control in the future. That would be great. But as a first step wouldn’t a simple measure be to

  1. add a Unit Cost column in to the purchasing side.
  2. adding a regular selling price column in to the Inventory Management that is in place already as at the moment when I set up an invoice it defaults to the unit cost as the inventory management is only linked in to the sales side.
  3. Use the same predictive system for the “Item” that is used when raising an invoice, as when purchasing and when tagging a sale through paypal / ebay etc.

If anyone has any input to try and manage these things in a better way I’d be interested to know.

Regards
Richard

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That is correct, we dispensed with the requirement to record quantities on the purchase side, from a bookkeeping perspective it’s the headline figures that counts and having to enter quantities and individual line items for purchases introduces a lot of friction for most of the businesses that use Quick File. You can always attach a receipt scan if you need a reference to specific details on the receipt, I’d actively encourage this as it will give you a very strong audit trail and it would be this area that would be under scrutiny if HMRC were to pay a visit.

Stock control actually is a larger area than we originally anticipated. I appreciate your input on how we can adapt the software and we will explore options in the future. Your suggestions would allow us to introduce some basic stock control features, but even these changes require pretty drastic modification to some core functionality, which is very difficult to retrofit.

EDIT —>>

I should add that with Purchase Orders, the need for recording quantities is more relevant and this is something we are likely to address in forthcoming iterations. I covered this on a post in our previous forum (see the last comment).

QUESTION: how can i add purchase qty and price?

I understand Glenn.
Where you put “and having to enter quantities and individual line items for purchases introduces a lot of friction”, I would ask why should they have to?
If the column was there, couldn’t it be set so that those that only need the headline figure can just put in the headline figure?
Best of both worlds?

That would work, and also we could show the ‘qty’ column only if a user enabled it in the account settings.

Really the main difficulties for us are due to technical restraints with the way the core system works. Adding a simple qty column would mean re-coding in 100s of places and would take a lot of time to update and test. Unfortunately there are other more pressing areas we need to tackle first.

I’ve just been thinking that the lack of a quantity column in the purchase side, particularly for Purchase Orders is frustrating and found this thread. So I suppose part of this post is to support the idea of adding a quantity column.

In other (desktop based) software I’ve used in the past creating an “item/inventory item” as you call them allows you to indicate if that item is for sale, purchase or both. Each item can then be linked against a sales or purchase category as relevant and a sale price as well as a purchase price can be set.

For us this would make the input of purchase orders and purchases much easier as we have agreed supplier pricing for line items in most cases and we wouldn’t need to re-enter descriptions each time for every new PO or purchase.

Thanks for reading/listening!

Regards,

Richard.

The more I think about this, the more I feel that quantity in purchase orders would be really helpful and that alone would resolve most of the concern!

We looked at the integration of this feature but it’s huge job. It wouldn’t be so bad but purchase orders share much of the back-end functionality of purchase invoices and changing one invariably means changing the other. I’d like to say we can go ahead with this but I’m afraid with all our other commitments it’s probably not going to happen soon.

BTW I do agree that purchase order QTY would be very useful. I’ve asked my colleague to take another look to see if we can find a way this can be done without turning everything upside down.

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This really ought to be on the Purchase screen too. So here’s my vote.

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