Purchasing / Stock control;

[Air-Tech]

I'm using SD 2013 Business & unless I'm missing something, there seems to be little provision on the purchase ordering side of things?

Although I can currently get figures for a supplier PO based on Stock Levels / Stock Warning, it's quite laborious & not subtle at all. When said stock arrives, I cant see a way of quickly accepting it into stock (as no PO was generated), so it's a case of manually adjusting stock levels which is time consuming & opens the door for errors.

Ideally I would like to be able to generate PO's based on sales history & criteria such as what period the PO is to last, edit the PO as required & then have it saved, so that when the supplier order arrives, the PO can be accepted straight into the existing stock levels.

Am I missing something, are there any add-on's available for this? I've had a look at EPOS, but we don't do over the counter retail & I cant see the need for scanning as the information is already in SD somewhere....


Any advice or insight very much appreciated.







I'm wondering if there is any way of generating purchase orders based on sales history & order points, so that supplier orders can be generated to satisfy a certain length of time in a "generate order for supplier Y to satisfy X amount of time

Most of my employment in previous life was closely tied to purchasing &

[Duncan Rounding]

Try Mole-End.biz they may have something that suits you. Their One Stop Order Processing software might help.

[saucysal]

We use Sage 50

We use Sage 50 in conjunction with SD 2013, handling all the purchase orders in Sage and then importing the stock figures into SD when goods arrive.

We export sales orders into Sage, it allocates and updates the stock, enter the purchase orders in Sage, not updating until the delivery arrives. We also update the stock from Sage to SD at least once a day to correct any errors on SD.

So basically Sage handles the stock control, with the figures updating to SD.

In our case there is no extra expense as we use Sage 50 anyway for our book-keeping.

Sarah

[Air-Tech]

Duncan;

I've previously had a look at Mole-End, but the offerings seem to be far more focused on sales /orders rather than purchasing & I don't really have any issues with the sales order side of things.

Sarah;

I had though that this may involve Sage to get what I'm looking for, but I'm not sure about Sage's abilities with regards to sales monitoring / forecasting.

Do you know if Sage simply creates PO's based on manual product order points or if it can be a bit more elaborate & do things like suggesting order points based on sales & create PO's based on time (create an order for supplier to satisfy X weeks demand)?


Thank you both!

[mash]

Stock up - is quite easy to import stock changes using Excel, I currently do that, saving as a Tab text file, then import and it updates the stock really easily. For me it is a weekly process, usually anything from 60 to 200 lines I adjust.

I am currently working on an Access program to help me tweak this process, all you need to know is the product reference, the a column called stock in hand.

That of course does help on the PO side.

[Air-Tech]

Mash - I've messed about a bit with this but I'm not really that happy with it as it's still a line by line process...

I exported, got rid of all the irrelevant rows & columns & created the order in a new column & saved- when the stock arrives, I re-exported, rearranged, added the "order" stock value column, used Excel to add them & then re-imported to give a live stock + new stock total. it works fine, but still seems like a long & error possible process.

If there is a way of exporting just stock levels from product X to product Y it would be easier - I suppose if I was an Excel or Access wizard most of it could be automated, but alas I'm not...

Good luck with the Access route.



Thanks.

[saucysal]

Sage

Sage is good for stock monitoring etc. but not for automatic purchase order entry, as far as I know (I haven't tried to do this and it is not immediately apparent).

For each product in Sage there are records of the sales each month and the previous year, and you can set a level (in our case sales per month) below which the product comes up in red in the products list if there is insufficient stock, and you can set the quantity to order (we base this on the number in a case).

When I prepare a purchase order, I bring up in Sage all the products for that particular supplier, see the ones highlighted in red that I need to order, do a calculation of the present stock and the current sales rate, to see how many to order. A colleague does it a different way by using Sage in conjunction with Excel (this is a feature in Sage), but each to his own.

Sarah

[Air-Tech]

Sarah,

I thought that may be the case & it's certainly some of the way there & I'll have a look at it - thanks.


I'm possibly missing something here, but the type of business that we are in revolves in a large part around efficient stock & I'm surprised that there isn't anything "in the box" for this or that nobody else is supplying "One stop purchase ordering" or the likes.

In a previous life I was responsible for moving a stock based business from what was largely guess work to stock level automation - recording sales, forecasting, creating & accepting PO's. Finessing the stock levels & order points reaped considerable benefits in a relatively short time, reducing unnecessary stock holding & reducing lost sales. The misconceptions of what sold & what didn't were an eye opener to say the least!

That was someone else's stock, more than 20 years ago & now I finding that I'm back on the same boat

[JimboS]

Have you tried http://www.1stoporders.co.uk/.

We use this to generate stock orders based on previous order history.

Works very well for us.

James

[Air-Tech]

James,

That looks interesting! After Duncan's reply I had looked at mole-end.biz, but couldn't see anything very specific about purchasing, however looking at 1stoporders.co.uk I see that it may be useful.

Thanks.