Knowing where you stand
Before you start, open these pages: Stock / Stock levels, Stock / Lot reports, Purchases / Purchase reports and Sales / Sales reports.
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.
A season is long, and most of it is invisible unless you go and look. Four reports, four questions, and a routine for asking them.
The four reports
Stock reports. What you are holding, by store and by group. Run it by store when you want to know what one store is sitting on.
Lot reports. Which batches. Filter by expiry before a date, by where the goods came from, or by store. Two habits here: check expiry every week, and check origin whenever a buyer or an inspector asks.
Purchase reports. What you bought, from whom, and where. Group it by supplier and it tells you how much of your season came from how few farmers. Most businesses are surprised by that number.
Sales reports. What sold, to whom, at what price. You can group it four different ways, and each one is a different conversation.
What no report will tell you
That produce has stopped moving. A slow batch and a fast one both show up as a number. The slow one is costing you storage, tying up your cash, and will eventually lose its value. To see it, use the expiry report, or open an item and notice how short its list of movements is.
Which farmers are reliable. That lives in the discrepancies on your goods receipts, and only if somebody wrote down what actually arrived.
A business that always receives exactly what the field note said has a purchase history and no idea which suppliers are any good.
That is the reward for the discipline in lesson 4, and it arrives a whole season later.
Before you trust a number
Nearly every wrong stock number in a farming business comes from one of four things. You can see all four in the item’s list of movements.
- Someone recorded a movement at the wrong store.
- Goods were sent out and nobody marked them as received.
- A loss everyone knew about was recorded as “we counted less than expected”, so the reason is gone.
- A receipt was entered at the field figure instead of the weighed figure.
None of them show up in the balance on its own. One minute in the list of movements before a big decision is the cheapest insurance in this course.
You have finished
You have followed one load from a farmer’s scale to a buyer’s invoice. Setting up what you hold. Buying in the field with no signal. Receiving honestly. Holding stock across stores. Processing it so you can still say where it came from. Selling and shipping it. And reading where you stand.
Where to go next depends on your job.
- Inventory and Stock is the deepest one, and the most useful for anybody working in a store.
- Purchasing and Suppliers for anybody buying.
- Sales and Customers for anybody selling.
- FeePrime Essentials if you have not done it. The approval and audit habits it teaches are what make everything here worth trusting.
Keep staging.feeprime.com for anything you want to try before you do it for real.