Purchase reports and supplier performance

Before you start, open this page: Purchases / Purchase 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 purchase report answers what you bought, from whom, where, and for how much, over a period of time.

What you choose

A start date and end date for the window.
Group by, which decides the shape of the answer.
Filters for supplier, item, location, location tag and currency.
Include line details, to switch between a summary and every single line.

If that sounds like the sales report, that is on purpose. Same questions, pointed the other way.

Group by changes the question

   by supplier   who you depend on
   by item       what you spend on
   by location   where the spending happens
   by period     whether it is creeping up

The one nobody ever runs is by supplier, and it is the most revealing.

Most businesses find they depend on far fewer suppliers than they thought. One supplier accounting for a big share of your buying is a risk nobody chose, and it stays invisible until you group it this way.

Currencies, again

Same warning as the sales report. Adding up amounts in different currencies gives you a confident number that means nothing.

Either filter to one currency, or read the breakdown as separate figures.

What this report will not tell you

Whether a supplier is reliable.

The report shows what you bought and what you paid. It does not show that one supplier is always late, or always short, or that their goods always come with notes from whoever inspected them.

That information does exist. It is in the expected delivery dates on your purchase orders, and the discrepancy flags on your goods receipts. But only if somebody kept those up to date.

A business that always receives exactly what it ordered has a buying history and no idea which suppliers are any good.

That is the reward for the discipline in the receiving lesson. Write down what actually arrived, and a year later you can say which suppliers are worth keeping.

You have finished

That is the end of Purchasing and Suppliers. Here is what you now know.

The five documents, and which question each one answers.
The three-way check, and why the receipt in the middle is what makes it work.
That receiving carefully is where you protect the money you spend on buying.
How buying in the field works when there is no signal.
How deliveries record a journey.
How to ask the reports something useful.

Put that together with Inventory and Stock, and Sales and Customers, and you have the whole path of goods and money through a trading business. In one side, held, and out the other.

Next is Cash and Accounting, which is where all of it lands.

Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.