Inventory and Supplier

1

I’d like to apply the Supplier Code number to inventory. We have a booth in an antique mall and each item we buy to resell we’d like to apply the supplier code so we can track sales by supplier.

2

Manager does not provide this functionality by default.

However, you have many options to deal with this issue:

  1. Append supplier code to Inventory item code
  2. Use a custom field for supplier code following this guide
3

It would have been easier if #1 was doable…but alas we’ve decided to make it simpler by assigning just a few Supplier codes and lump them together. If my wife decides to buy something at a yard sale, it goes into code 504. But if she also buys something later than day at a thrift store, it would also be code 504. Hundreds of separate transactions with one supplier code as we don’t care who we bought it from.

Number 2 might work, and I’ll give that a try as I continue to set up the system.

Thanks for your insights!

4

@jm_collectibles, these two statements seem to contradict one another. If you don’t care where you got an item, why bother to track its supplier in any way? That’s just more work to furnish information you don’t care about. Information no one looks at is useless, and all energy and time expended to collect it is wasted.

Now that you’ve explained more about your situation, a few thoughts may be helpful:

  • Do you really need suppliers at all? They are only essential if you are creating purchase quotes, purchase orders, purchase invoices, or goods receipts. It doesn’t sound like you would use any of those transaction types if you are buying antiques at yard sales and thrift shops. Aren’t all of your purchases cash (versus credit) transactions? Disabling the tab will simplify your user interface.

  • If you are interested in the type of source for your inventory, you can just create a few notional supplier types, such as Yard sales, Thrift stores, and Estate sales. You can use these “suppliers” on cash payment forms.

  • If it is ever usful to know a specific source, such as a particular estate, that could be placed in a custom field on the payment form named something like Notes. Entry of that information would be completely optional.

  • You could also begin with a few notional supplier types and expand later if you decide you want more information. For example, Thrift stores might later be expanded to Salvation Army, Philharmonic Symphony Thrift Shop, etc.

  • Your original concept of tagging inventory items with supplier codes seems pointless for your type of inventory. You are going to have primarily or exclusively single-unit inventory items. The antique, drop-leaf table you find at an auction is probably never going to be repeated. Once it sells, you should make that inventory item inactive. (The point of a supplier code for a specific inventory item is normally to record the source of something you stock routinely so you know where to order it when you need more.)

To wrap up, your question and situation illustrate a valuable concept. As you design your accounting system, including the chart of accounts, tab options, form defaults, and so forth, you should create a test business to explore ideas and alternatives. Enter typical transactions. Create the kinds of reports you think you might find helpful. Determine which features seem exciting but end up being unnecessary. Streamline your setup to provide everything you need without burdening yourself with extra steps to capture information with no purpose. (There was an article about this in the December newsletter.) Only after you’ve satisfied yourself with the test business should you commit fully to running your business with Manager.

5

Thanks for the suggestions. Perhaps I was inelegant in saying we don’t care about the supplier. I should say we don’t need to track which yard sale we bought stuff from, simply that we bought said items from a yard sale and we reflect that to track expenses. Therefore I figured a generic supplier would suffice.

I’m basically working on this program right now as a sample business. But I don’t see anywhere on the forum or within this program where I might be able to import say a CSV spreadsheet of hundreds of inventory items. If possible this would greatly speed up the process instead of transferring those inventory items from my spreadsheet to Manager.

Thanks again for your help.

6

You should really start by reading the guides and, in this particular case, search for batch create and batch update.