Sale or return - how to record inventory from different suppliers and invoices

Shopify Discussion
1

We are developing a site for our bookstore, and one of the features we’re going to need is a method of recording the inventory that comes from different suppliers, at a specific date.

For example, if we had 10 publishers send us 250 books on the 1st of March, we need a way to be able to record (and easily pull up) what publisher sent us what books, and on what date/invoice.

We operate on a Sale or Return basis, so it will be an essential feature, so we don’t have to absorb the cost of the entire stock.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Many thanks

Paddy

2

One option would be to use the “Purchase Orders” functionality in Shopify Admin. From your Shopify admin, go to Products > Purchase orders, and then click “Create purchase order”.

You can then choose the supplier and enter details about the arrival date, specific products and associated cost/quantity, etc. You can search for existing draft Purchase Orders or received Purchase Orders in the “Purchase Orders” table, where you can sort/filter by supplier and arrival date, as well as see cost details.

If you want the PO quantities to be reflected in your Shopify product quantities when the PO is received, you can mark the respective PO as “Ordered” and enter the quantity received for each product in the PO. If you don’t want the PO quantities to be reflected in your Shopify product quantities, you can leave the PO as a draft or you can leave the received quantities as 0.

Here’s a link for more details about this functionality.

3

Hi! I am also interested in sendig books back to our suppliers, but I can’t figure out how to state how many copies of each product we’re actually returning. We can’t find a way to have a negative number. Also, we’d like to be able to know by which supplier a product actually arrived, as it may come to us by different suppliers.

Thank you again!

5

Hi Paddy,

Keen to know how you got on. PO functionality seems to be better for bulk orders vs small-scale receipts with lots of SKUs/ISBNs from many different suppliers, which is what we currently face. How do you currently reconcile value of stock received against supplier invoices?