mInventory Help – Purchasing
The purchasing workflow is used when you purchase goods from your vendors. It allows you to create purchase orders, send them to your vendors to start the order process, and manage the receiving process. The table below describes these fields that are applicable to purchase orders:
| Date | The date of your purchase order. Defaults to current date. |
| Order Number | A system generate purchase order number. You can not change this value. |
| Status | The status of the purchase order. Either ‘In Process’ or ‘Received’. |
| Type | The type of the purchase order. |
| Description | Free form description for you to describe the purchase. |
| Shipping & Handling | Any costs that you are shared for shipping products to your business. |
| Taxes | Any taxes that you are charged for the items on the purchase order. |
| Comments | Free form comments for you to annotate. |
| Items | A list of inventory items that are on the purchase order. |
There are two ways to add items. The first is to click the Add button below the item lists. This will open up a panel from which you can search for and select items to add. The second way is to drag them from the main window’s inventory list. You’ll noticed that your open purchase window stays on top of your inventory list but you can still click behind it on the main window. The filter and search functions are still active and once you find the item you wish to purchase, you can drag it onto the purchase items list.
As you add items you can change two values in the purchase items list. These are quantity and item cost. Set these values for all of your items and then click the save button.
The workflow used in purchasing can very from business and we support a couple of methods.
Manual or Online Purchase Method – Workflow 1
In this method, you will have already gone to a retail store or warehouse and purchased goods. You’ll have brought these back to your business, tagged them and created inventory items. The act of making a purchase in this method is just to acknowledge the receipt of these goods and update inventory levels. When you create the purchase record in mInventory you should immediately set the status to “Received”. This acknowledges receipt and updates the inventory levels with the quantities of each item purchased. These items are now ready to be sold.
We recommend that you print a Purchase Detail Report for your records and attach the receipts for the items your purchased and file.
Purchase Order Method – Workflow 2
This method is a little more complicated and is used by larger businesses. Once the purchase is created it stays in the “In Process” status. You save the purchase and print a “Purchase Order”. This purchase order is then sent to the vendor (typically by email) and the vendor will pick, pack and ship the goods to you. Some point later these goods show up at your business. Assuming that they all come in one shipment, you simply change the status on the purchase to “Received”. If the goods show up in multiple shipments, you can selectively identify those items received by checking the “rcvd” checkbox next to the items. This will change the status on the purchase to “Partial Receipt”. When the remaining good show up, you can set the purchase status to “Received” to acknowledge full receipt of goods.
Like the manual purchase method, we recommend that you print a Purchase Detail Report for your records and attach the receipts you received with the shipments.
Acknowledge Receipt of Goods
As described above, you need to acknowledge the receipt of goods in order to have the inventory items updated to reflect the new inventory.
To acknowledge receipts of good, select the purchase order that you want to receive and click on the “Acknowledge Receipts” button on the Action Panel. You can also right click on the purchase order line and choose the option from the popup menu. You will see the following screen:
For those items on a purchase order that have been received, you should check the ‘Rcvd’ check box. If you have not received all items on the purchase order, the status drop down will be “Partial Receipt”. If all good were received, this should be “Received”. Note that it’s important to specify the location that the good are received into if you are using our stocking locations functionality. You should also set the date that the items were received.
There are short-cut field on the Acknowledge Receipt window that you can use to quickly update all items with the same value. This is typically only used if all items are received on the purchase order.
When you are done on the screen, click Save and the inventory records will be updated to reflect the new receipts.