One consignment of cocoa, end to end

Before you start, open these pages: Sales / Sales orders, Purchases / Purchase orders and Stock / Goods receipts.

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.

This lesson follows one load of cocoa, from the message asking for it to the money repaid.

It runs in five stages, and the order is not the one most people expect. You do not buy cocoa and then look for somebody to sell it to. A customer asks, and that is what tells the buyer how much to order. Nine different people touch the load along the way, and only five of them work for you: the customer, the cooperative and the creditor do not.

Each step below says where it happens in the menu and who usually does it.

Stage 1. Set up, once

Your warehouse, and the conditioning facility. Both go in Settings / Business Locations, even though only one is your building. On the facility, tick can transform and give it a site code. The code is required, because the batches made there are named after it, and for export you have to be able to say where a bag was conditioned.

Your contacts. Cooperatives, customers, the jute bag supplier and the creditor all go in Sales / Contacts.

Three stock items, not one. Wet cocoa, jute bags, and conditioned cocoa in bags. They are three things you can count separately, so they are three records in Stock / Stock Items.

A recipe. In Stock / Recipes: wet cocoa and jute bags in, bagged cocoa out. The production run reads this, and it is what makes the bags get used up instead of sitting on a shelf forever.

A batch type. In Stock / Batch types: moisture, grade, region, and which cooperative it came from. Give grade and region a fixed list of allowed values, or one region becomes Maroua, maroua and Marroua and you can never add it up.

Before you buy anything, set three things on the stock item: tracking to lot tracked, a shelf life in days, and FEFO so the batch that expires first goes out first. Wet and conditioned cocoa keep for very different lengths of time, so give them different shelf lives. Changing any of this once you are holding stock is painful.

Stage 2. Demand

A customer asks. A message, a phone call, or somebody walking into the yard. Two tonnes, conditioned, by the 20th.

Capture it in Sales / Orders while it is still fresh. Who, what, how much, by when. Written on the back of a receipt, it is gone by Friday.

Price it in Sales / Quotes. Price the conditioned weight, not what the cooperative will deliver. Drying takes weight off and conditioning costs money.

When they accept, turn the quote into a sales order in Sales / Sales orders. One button, and the lines and prices come across with it. Go straight to a sales order and you are promising a delivery at a price nobody agreed.

Stage 3. Supply

Read what is promised in Sales / Sales orders. Anything still open is sold and not yet sent, and that is how much cocoa you actually need. Buy on how empty the shelf looks and you will buy cocoa nobody asked for.

Order from the cooperative in Purchases / Purchase orders. That is how its head knows what you want and when.

Order the jute bags separately, from your bag supplier. Have them delivered to the conditioning facility, or transfer them there. A production run cannot use bags sitting in your warehouse, and finding that out on bagging day costs you the day.

Then you drive out to the cooperative, and the next five things all happen at their warehouse, in one visit.

Three of your experts test the load before it moves.

Weigh it and raise the receipt in Stock / Goods receipts, against the purchase order. It works with no signal, which matters, because their yard rarely has any. Two things catch people out here:

• Business location is where the goods LAND — your warehouse — even though you are standing in theirs when you fill it in.
• The batch sits on the line: reference, origin, expiry, and what your batch type asks for, which is moisture and grade.

Mark the receipt inspected and record what the experts found. If it failed, mark discrepancy instead, with notes and a photo. That photo settles the argument later. The measured numbers belong on the batch, not buried in a note.

Raise the cooperative’s bill in Purchases / Bills, from the purchase order, so the lines come across. Bill what the receipt actually weighed, not what the order said. Loads come in short, and billing the ordered weight overpays.

The creditor pays the cooperative, there and then. None of your cash moves. Record it in Cash / Transactions as a bill payment with Paid by a third party ticked, the creditor as Paid by, and a credit subtype. Leave the tick off and your books show cash leaving a float nobody opened, and the cooperative reads as settled by you.

Use the same credit subtype every time for the same creditor, or what you owe them splits across two accounts and neither one answers the question.

Stage 4. Condition and send

Send it to the facility in Stock / Stock Transfers, and mark it dispatched when the truck leaves. Sending it out is not selling it. The cocoa is on your books the whole time it is away, and if nobody raises the transfer your warehouse shows stock that is not in the building.

They sign for it on the same transfer, marked received, with the weight that actually arrived. If less arrived than left, say so in the discrepancy notes.

They dry it, clean it and bag it. Stones and broken beans come out, your jute bags get filled, and it weighs less than it did.

Record the production run in Stock / Production runs. Set the location to the facility, not your warehouse, because a run happens where the stock is. Pick the recipe, enter what went in and what came out, and mark it completed with an output lot ref and an output lot expiry. If a run yields less than the recipe said, the gap is either water that was always coming off or cocoa going missing, and nobody can tell which if it was not written down.

The facility bills you for the work, in Purchases / Bills. Conditioning is a real cost of the cocoa. Leave it out and every consignment looks more profitable than it was.

Pack the shipment in Stock / Shipments, picking from the facility, not your warehouse. It ships straight from there, and FEFO hands you the batch that expires first. This step is what moves the stock, not the invoice.

Send it in Stock / Deliveries. One journey can carry several shipments to different customers.

Stage 5. Money

Invoice the customer in Sales / Invoices, once it has actually been delivered.

Record what they pay in Cash / Transactions, as an invoice payment. Every part payment goes in separately, so the invoice always shows what is still outstanding.

Repay the creditor in Cash / Transactions, as a credit repayment, out of the money the customer just sent. Same contact, same credit subtype as on the bill payment. A different subtype repays a different account and leaves the first one still showing the debt.

Then the credit line is clear and you draw on it again for the next load.

Why the order matters

At any moment you should be able to say who you bought from, what it became, where it went, who owes you money and who you still owe. Skip a step and one of those answers goes missing.

Skip the goods receipt and you cannot say what really arrived, because after conditioning it is mixed in with other loads. Skip the production run and your quantities drift, because wet cocoa became dry cocoa and nothing wrote it down. Skip the third-party tick and your cash looks like it left a float that was never opened.

The cooperative is paid first and the creditor last. The people who grew the cocoa do not wait for your customer to pay.