Creating purchase order reports

[alexwren]

Hi Forum,

I am interested in options for creating purchase orders from within Actinic and wondered what other shop owners are doing to achieve this. Ideally we would want to add a custom field to each product (i.e. supplier) and then be able to run reports against each supplier to see what stock is required to re-order.

I assume that the options might be:

- Use an inbuilt Actinic report (if possible)
- Use something like Crystal reports to speak Actinic/Access directly
- Write some VBA to interogate Access DB

Any thoughts?

Alex

[Duncan Rounding]

The second and third are possible but a very easy way without getting your hands too dirty would be to use Excel to get the data from the product table. Then in Excel have a lookup table that has the product reference vs the supplier. You can then sort by supplier and list by stock holding.

[Jan]

How would you know what stock is required to reorder?

Regards,

[alexwren]

How would you know what stock is required to reorder?

Regards,

Not sure if your question is to me or Duncan? Anyway I think the plan would be to have several custom fields per product:

Supplier
Supplyer product code
Supplier pack size
Min stock level

These can then be used to create a report for each supplier based on magic formula (yet to be decided).

Alex

[3000rpm]

i have been looking for something similar to this also as we have an epos system in our shop that can do the same, at the moment we just use the reference number of product to match the company name for example

SUPPLIER-00001 (supplier order code)

then we go to view all stock that is stock controlled and just view the stock report and sort by reference code name so all product from supplier grouped together and print out the relevant pages.

we use the warn if below in stock tab as the number we want to keep in stock so if this shows 20 and we have 10 in stock we would order another 10.

ideally like our epos we can run a purchase order for a certain supplier and it can work out automatially i need 10 and just give me the information needed

let me know if you work something out

[Jan]

The key to using custom variables in reports is to define the variable at product level (so switch useParent off) - if you don't it can be quite hard to access the information.

Regards,

[Jan]

Our multichannel order processing program (http://www.1stoporders.co.uk) has a supplier module that produces purchase orders reports in the beta version (due to go live in 14 days). It might be worth taking a look at that, we are happy to make minor changes to it if it's not quite as you would like it to be.

Regards,