Hi Shirley,

Thank you for taking the time to answer, but I'm not quite sure I understand.

I don't invoice the item. We normally get an invoice from the vendor and I enter it, in its entirety under "enter bill", and then go into pay bills, and pay several invoices on one check. We are trying to move to a different procedure where we provide our vendor with a purchase order. When I tried this, since I couldn't job cost the purchase order, I tried to go to enter the bill using the stock items, and it still tells me that I can't job cost at time of purchase. I purchase material for a specific job and send it out to that job directly. We don't house material, nor do we bill our customer by the material.

I've not used the assemblies module before and am not sure it would be useful since we do not invoice our customer for material used.

It would work as a non-stock item, but then I have to manually input the price on each invoice myself (about 150 invoices a week) and each invoice typically has about 8-10 items on it. I was hoping for a more efficient way to set up purchase orders to our vendors without having to manually price them.

Thank you!

You're correct -- it's an either or situation. If you want the costs to go directly to the job you have to use non-stock items and they don't store the last unit cost. If you want the last unit cost you have to set them up as stock items and then you can post them directly to the jobs you have to use inventory adjustments to allocate the costs to the job. The only partial solution if you're ordering similar items with steady costs may be to use the copy PO capability.

I've looked at the inventory adjustments option and that just seems more cumbersome than it's worth - and would create more work by adding another step for me and the idea is to be more efficient.

I hadn't thought of using the "copy" feature in purchase orders -- that may be the feasible work around I was looking for -- thank you!! And a great suggestion!

If you are trying to set up purchase orders to our vendors without having to manually price them and you order the same items all the time, create the PO the first time and then copy the PO in the future as was mentioned by Tim.

If they are stock items, the price will automatically populate on the PO.

Job costing is usually used to track and determine income and profitability on a job. It is not usually used to look up last cost when placing the order. Maybe I am confused. :)

Yes, I will try the copy feature.

We are a drywall and paint company, so the material we are purchasing from our vendor (drywall and paint) is used in a job and directly affects the job profitability (the material is part of the job's budget, and each job has a specific amount of material ordered/budgeted).

When we place an order for the material to be delivered to the job site, instead of sending the vendor an excel sheet listing the items we need, having them use the excel to fulfill the order, and then sending us an invoice for the order that we would enter as a bill in Sage, we are trying to get rid of the excel sheet and just send them a purchase order with the material we are requesting, an then pay a bill directly off of that purchase order. We've worked this out in the past by utilizing the excel as a "detail" order, but when entering the bill, we enter one lump sum under "paint material" to be job-costed (using a dummy "paint material" item number that was set up as a non-stock item.) In order to itemize the purchase order, I had to find a way around entering all of the information on each invoice from scratch. The excel auto-populates with the price because we use a template.

Essentially, the "copy" function will be used as a template too and will work in a similar way. Thank you for the suggestions!