Collection runs: buying in the field
You’ll need: Collection runs, Business locations, Cash accounts — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.
Some businesses do not receive deliveries — they go out and buy. An agent takes a vehicle and money, visits producers or markets, buys what is available at the price of the day, and comes back loaded.
A collection run is that trip, recorded as one thing.
What a run holds
A run number and run date. The mobile location — the vehicle or agent carrying the goods — and the destination location they will be delivered to. The agent doing the buying. A purpose, and a cash float account: the money they set out with.
It moves through events: departed, arrived, closed, or cancelled with a reason.
The vehicle is a location
This is the idea that makes the whole thing work, and it came up in Essentials: a truck can be a business location.
Goods bought at the roadside go onto the vehicle, and the vehicle holds stock. So at any point in the day you can say what has been bought and where it physically is, rather than having a gap in your records between the first purchase and the evening unload.
The same is true of the money. The cash float is a real account with a real balance, so what the agent is carrying is trackable rather than a figure someone reconstructs afterwards.
Buying happens where there is no network
This is the case the offline capability in Essentials was built for.
The agent records each purchase as it happens — from whom, what, how much, at what price — with no connection at all. The device holds it and sends everything when the vehicle comes back into coverage.
That matters because the alternative is a notebook and an evening of re-typing, which is where the errors, the disputes and the missing receipts come from. Recording at the moment of purchase, in front of the person you are buying from, is the whole point.
Closing the run
When the vehicle returns, the goods move from the mobile location to the destination and the run is closed. The cash float is reconciled: what went out, what was spent, what came back.
A run that is never closed leaves stock sitting on a truck in your figures and money unaccounted for. Closing it is the step that makes the day’s buying real.
Bills can be linked to a run
A bill carries a collection run link, so what was bought on a trip can be settled as a document afterwards — which is how a month of buying from the same supplier becomes one bill rather than forty.
Try it
On staging.feeprime.com, set up a vehicle as a business location, run a collection with a cash float, and look at the stock and cash figures on the vehicle before you close it.