Setting Up Purchasing

Understanding How It Works

Built for Business is designed to allow you to manage all purchasing transactions for your business, if you choose to use the full features of the application. Before we begin to set up your information for Purchasing, let’s take a brief look at how the module is designed and how it works.

You can keep track of the purchases you make for the goods and services used by your business, the products you purchase for resale, and the transportation services you use. The application will automatically generate a purchase order for each of these transactions. Once you receive the invoice from your vendor (supplier), you can apply the invoice number to the purchase transaction, and when it is time to pay the invoice you can also record your payment. Built for Business will maintain your payment transactions and keep track of your current balance owing to the vendor.

Because of these features, it is important that you set up your purchasing accounts correctly so they will work properly. Each purchase must be assigned a category in order for the database to track them properly. The following is an explanation of how the goods and services categories are assigned within the application.

We have used five categories in order to classify your purchases:

• Product
  Merchandise that you purchase for resale. It could also be finished product that you produce or manufacture for sale.
• Services
  Services include your computer repair man, your electrician and plumber, office cleaning service, etc.
• Supplies
  Consumable products you purchase for use within your company like paper, laser or ink cartridges, envelopes, and shipping boxes.
• Equipment
  Non-consumable products you purchase for use within your company. Your computer, printer, and fax machine for example.
• Transport
  Transportation companies such as trucking companies, couriers, or any other type of shipping company you may use.

By properly categorizing your purchases, you will be able to generate reports that give you accurate costs within each of the categories, and you will not need to sort through a lot of irrelevant data when you are searching for a particular item.

If you are not planning to use the full functions of Purchasing, the only two categories that you need worry about is Product and Transport. These two fields are used in Customer Orders and are required for your ordering functions to work properly.

Before you can make any purchases, you need to do three things:

1. Enter your supplier information.
2. Enter the goods and services you will be purchasing.
3. Assign one or more supplier to each of the goods and services, along with the ordering information for that supplier.

Now let’s take a look at how to set up each of these items.