Purchase reports and supplier performance

You’ll need: Purchase reports — if you cannot see these, the module may be switched off for your business or outside your permissions. An administrator can change either.

A purchase report answers what you bought, from whom, where and for how much, over a period.

What you choose

Start date and end date for the window. Group by for the shape of the answer. Filters for supplier, inventory item, business location, location tag and currency. And include line details to switch between summary and every line.

If that reads like the sales report, it is deliberate — the same questions pointed the other way.

Group by changes the question

   by supplier   who you depend on
   by item       what you spend on
   by location   where the spending happens
   by period     whether it is drifting up

The one people never run is by supplier, and it is the most revealing. Most businesses discover they are far more concentrated than they thought — a single supplier accounting for a large share of purchases is a risk nobody chose, and it is invisible until you group by it.

Currency, again

The same warning as sales reports: adding figures in different currencies produces a confident, meaningless number. Filter by currency, or read the breakdown as separate figures.

What the report will not tell you

Reliability. The report shows what you bought and paid. It does not show that one supplier is consistently late, or short, or that their goods are always inspected with notes.

That information exists — in the expected delivery dates on your purchase orders, and the discrepancy flags on your goods receipts — but only if those were maintained. A business that always receives what it ordered has a purchase history and no supplier performance data at all.

This is the payoff for the discipline in the receiving lesson. Record what actually arrived and, a year later, you can tell which suppliers are worth keeping.

You have finished

That is Purchasing & Suppliers. You now know the five documents and which questions they answer, the three-way match and why the receipt in the middle is what makes it work, that receiving accurately is where purchasing money is protected, how field buying works when there is no network, how deliveries record journeys, and how to ask the reports something useful.

Together with Inventory & Stock and Sales & Customers, that is the whole flow of goods and money through a trading business — in one side, held, and out the other.

Next in the catalogue is Cash & Accounting, which is where all of it lands.

Keep staging.feeprime.com open as you go.