Collection runs: buying in the field
Before you start, open these pages: Operations / Collection runs, Settings / Business Locations and Cash / Cash Accounts.
Can’t find one? It may be turned off for your business, or your account may not be allowed to open it. Ask the person who set up your FeePrime. They can fix both.
Some businesses do not wait for deliveries. They go out and buy.
An agent takes a vehicle and some money, visits producers or markets, buys what is available at the day’s price, 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, which is the vehicle or agent carrying the goods.
- The destination, where the goods will be delivered.
- The agent doing the buying.
- A purpose.
- A cash float account, which is the money they set out with.
A run moves through departed, arrived and 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. Instead of having a hole in your records between the first purchase and the evening unload.
The same goes for the money. The cash float is a real account with a real balance, so what the agent is carrying can be tracked rather than worked out afterwards.
Buying happens where there is no signal
This is the case the offline work in Essentials was built for.
The agent records each purchase as it happens. Who from, what, how much, at what price. With no signal at all. The phone holds it and sends everything once the vehicle is back in coverage.
That matters because the alternative is a notebook and an evening of typing. Which is where the mistakes, the arguments and the missing receipts come from.
Recording at the moment of the purchase, standing in front of the person you are buying from, is the whole point.
Closing the run
When the vehicle comes back, the goods move off the vehicle to the destination, and the run is closed.
The cash float is squared up. What went out, what was spent, what came back.
A run that never gets closed leaves stock sitting on a truck in your records, and money nobody has accounted for. Closing it is what 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. That is how a month of buying from the same supplier becomes one bill instead of forty.
Try it
On staging.feeprime.com, set up a vehicle as a business location. Run a collection with a cash float. Then look at the stock and the cash on the vehicle before you close it.