Buying: orders, arrivals and what reaches the shelf

The four kinds of line

One order can mix them: a single delivery from one vendor routinely carries chairs for the warehouse and gaffer tape for Saturday. The kind sits on each line, not on the order, and it is the one thing that decides whether the line ever reaches your stock figures.

• Stock — names an item always, and a job never.
• Consumable — names an item never, and a job if you want.
• Sub-hire — names an item always, and a job always.
• Service — names an item if you want, and a job if you want.

Only a stock line adds to what you own. A consumable is used up, a repair buys somebody’s time, and a sub-hire is somebody else’s chairs going home again afterwards — none of them belongs in your inventory.

What to buy

The buy list gathers everything the warehouse is short of today and everything sitting at or below its reorder point, and says what is already on its way against each one. It is worked out fresh every time you open it, from the same figures the conflicts screen and the dashboard use, so the three cannot disagree.

Two numbers sit side by side on a row, and the difference matters. The shortfall is what you are short, stated in full. Beside it, what is still to buy is that figure less whatever is already on order or hired in. The first says how bad it is; the second says whether you need to do anything. A row covered in full stays on the list, marked as covered, because “nothing to do” and “handled” are different states and you should be able to tell them apart.

An item with no reorder point set never appears here unless it is actually short. The reorder point is the one on the item itself, the same figure the inventory screens have always called it.

Ordering from a row carries the item and the quantity across, so the order opens part-written rather than blank.

Sub-hire answers a shortfall without hiding it

When you hire a hundred chairs in for a Saturday your availability does not go up, and that is deliberate. The chairs are not yours, and they are only here for two days. If they went into your stock figures they would still be there next month.

So the conflicts screen still says you are short, and says underneath what you have hired in to cover it and when it arrives. The problem is answered rather than papered over, which is also the honest picture: somebody still has to send those chairs back.

Signing for a delivery is not the same as taking it into stock

Recording what arrived is a warehouse job. Anybody who can receive can stand at the door with a phone and put in what came off the van, and doing so changes no stock figures at all.

Taking it into stock is an office job, and it needs the same permission as changing any other stock total. That is what actually raises the number of chairs you own, and it writes a line in the item’s history naming the order it came in on.

The split is the point. The floor says what turned up; the office says what the company now owns. Only stock lines have the second step, because nothing else was ever going onto a shelf.

If more turns up than you ordered

Record what actually came. If two hundred and ten chairs arrive against an order for two hundred, put in two hundred and ten — the order will show that it is over, and somebody in the office decides what to do about it. Rounding it down to the number on the order would quietly understate what is now in your building.

What you owe, and paying it

A purchase order says what you asked for. A bill is what the vendor has actually invoiced you, and the two are deliberately separate records: you routinely order before a price is agreed, get billed in instalments, or get one bill covering three orders.

A bill keeps their number, off the paper in front of you, because that is what you will be quoting when you ring them about it. Its tax is whatever they charged, typed in as stated rather than worked out from a rate — if our figure and their paper disagree, they are right.

Each line can point at something you ordered, and lines often do not: a delivery charge, a pallet deposit and a price nobody agreed in advance are all real and belong to no order line. Where a line does point at one, the order itself can then say what it has been billed, and flags the two cases worth a look — billed for more than turned up, and delivered but never billed.

Payments are recorded against the bill until nothing is left owing. You cannot pay more than is owed, and a bill cannot be reduced below what has already been paid against it — a figure that does not add up means somebody made a mistake, and quietly absorbing it would hide the mistake.

A bill keyed in by error is removed outright, and that is refused once money has been paid against it. This is the opposite of voiding a customer invoice, and for a plain reason: your invoice went to somebody, and a document somebody is holding can only be retracted, never un-sent. A supplier bill is a note to yourself about a piece of paper on your desk.

Vendors, and why they are not your transport suppliers

A vendor is who you buy from, and carries an email because that is where an order goes. A transport supplier is a firm you hire a truck from, lives under Dispatch, and is picked while somebody is standing in a yard assigning a run.

They are two separate lists. If you use the same firm for both, it appears in each, because the two answer different questions.

A vendor is archived rather than deleted. Orders you have already raised keep the name they went to — an order that has forgotten who supplied it is a worse record than one naming a firm you no longer use.

Cancelling an order

Cancelling asks why, and it does not reverse anything that has already arrived. If half the order turned up before you called the rest off, that half is in the building and the record says so.