Is there any way to warn or prevent a user from entering a non-zero cost for an item?

If there isn't, can that be a company profile option, similar to the options in OrderEntry that warn a user if they try to enter an item for a price of zero?

Thanks

Steve

Hi Steve,
This issue is not usually a problem in Inventory assuming that most businesses that have items would/should be using Purchase Orders.

If you create a new item in inventory, you do not need to enter a cost for the item. When you create your first PO for that item, as in the first time that you are ordering the item from a supplier, the recent cost is updated with the PO cost as soon as you post the PO.

The implications are if you created a sales order in OE, and actually invoiced the item before you actually received the item quantity into inventory, the recent cost would be updated from the originating PO.

The only way that this non-zero cost issue would be an issue, is if the client site was not using PO's. But who would do that? While the issue proposed may seem to be isolated within Inventory Control, there is already a very good solution to deal with the issue.

Best,
Brian

Steve

Is the problem you are trying to prevent is “issuing a PO for $0.00”, effectively the equivalent to signing a blank check (cheque)?

It's no different than someone trying to enter a sales order for $0 - some companies want to prevent what is usually a user error. OrderEntry can pop a warning; PurchaseOrders can't. I'd like it to be able to.

The rest of what I'm going to write is tangential to my request but some of you may be interested in the background. The requesting client is a distributor who sells expensive parts (each is a separate item in Adagio). Customers often ship the items back for repair. They would like to use Adagio to monitor the repair cycle instead of Excel (which they are doing now). The steps once they receive the parts are:

1) They ship the part to the item's vendor together with a packing list (including instructions), asking for a cost quote to perform the repair.
2) The vendor sends a quote for doing the repair.
3) Based on the vendor's quote, they send a quote to the customer for authorization
4) The customer authorizes the work, at which point a sales order is created, and from it a PO to the vendor. (This is the point at which they want to prevent a $0 cost)
5) The vendor ships them the repaired part, together with an invoice
6) They ship the repaired part to the customer, together with an invoice

I am creating a GridView that will display each repair, including where it stands in the cycle and other necessary information. Part of that information is the PO amount.

It's quite a bit more complicated than this - for example the customer may decline the repair. Or the part may be under warranty. And generating the packing list in Step 1 without requiring double-entry is interesting - I am having them enter it as a Template Quote in SalesCQ (using the prospect table to store the vendor information). This flows from a customer quote to a sales order to a PO seamlessly. If anyone is interested in my documentation detailing how this works, please email me.

Steve
steve@sschwartzcpa.com

Steve

For the normal usage of PO, I would also like to see a “warn on zero cost”. Hopefully Softrak will pass this on to R&D.

Hi, Steve/Doug,

I've entered your suggestion to R&D.

Hello Steve,

This feature has been added in the PurchaseOrders 9.3B (2022.01.13) Upgrade just released:

A company profile option has been added to give a warning when posting a purchase order that the total cost of the PO is zero. It is still possible to post the purchase order after this warning if required.