Purchase and Items

3

You have two completely different situations, @nucera:

  1. When you purchase items for your own inventory, to hold until sold, you select the previously defined inventory item, which automatically posts that line item to Inventory on hand (an asset account). Once it is in inventory, you can sell it to any customer.

  2. When you purchase something for use on a specific customer’s job, and it will never enter your inventory for possible sale to others or use in manufacturing, you can allocate the purchase to Billable expenses and the specific customer’s subaccount. The item will not appear in your inventory records, but will still show as an asset, waiting to be invoiced through the Customers tab.

See these two Guides for more information:

https://forum.manager.io/t/inventory-items/7551

https://forum.manager.io/t/tracking-billable-expenses/5503

If you use Billable Expenses and create an invoice from the Customers tab, you can then also add regular inventory items. In your business, an example would be the installation of a customized power distribution panel, one that no other customer could use. The panel itself might be purchased as a billable expense. After raising the initial invoice for that specialized item, you could add common inventory items, such as strain relievers, circuit breakers, and wire.

Note that items purchased as billable expenses will never appear in your expense accounts, because you will have purchased them on behalf of the customer. Likewise, they will never appear in your income unless you mark them up to a higher price than you paid, in which case only the markup goes to income.