Purchases - overview

The Purchases workspace helps you organise and control the purchasing process, plan purchasing expenses, and reduce spending on goods and services. Visma Net automates the purchasing process: issuing purchase orders, receiving orders, and creating purchase invoices. With the Purchases workspace, you gain complete visibility into the whole purchasing process, from planning purchases to paying the invoices.

Multiple purchase order types

The Purchases workspace supports the following purchase order types: Normal, Drop shipment, Blanket, and Standard. The functionalities that affect the list of order types (if not enabled) are: Blanket and standard purchase orders and Drop shipments. Orders of different types have different functionality and fulfilment flows; for instance, orders of the Standard type can be included in Normal orders. For more information, see: About types of purchase orders.

Default settings

Multiple default settings, if they hold the values your employees use most frequently, help users save time and avoid input errors during data entry. Some default settings are defined within the Purchases workspace, while others are defined in the workspaces that integrate closely with purchasing. Users can, of course, override these values at any time. For more information, see: About purchasing-related defaults and overrides.

Integration with Finance and Inventory

Due to seamless integration of the workspaces in the Finance and Inventory modules, you can generate back orders, view item availability data, generate invoices for drop-ship orders, and view customer demand when you create purchase orders. You can automatically generate supplier ledger invoices and inventory receipts and issues.

Such integration eliminates repetitive data entry and automates workflows for the complete purchasing cycle.

Supplier catalogues

To maintain up-to-date information on supplier prices in Visma Net, you can create supplier catalogues and update them periodically for each supplier. For updating, you can use information on released supplier documents or import supplier price lists. If the Volume pricing functionality is enabled in the Enable/disable functionalities (CS100000) window, you can define price tiers for different quantities of the items purchased from a particular supplier. Also, you can specify minimum and maximum order quantities, lot sizes, alternative IDs used by suppliers for products they sell, and other related information. For more details, see About supplier catalogues.

Supplier prices and discounts

By maintaining supplier discounts and prices in the system, you can take advantage of quantity pricing offers from the suppliers and effectively plan your purchases. In Visma Net, you can enter and maintain the supplier discounts that the system applies automatically to each purchase order or invoice if the Supplier discounts functionality is enabled. Supplier prices and discounts can be configured in the Supplier ledger workspace.

Flexible approval procedures

Most organisations require that purchase orders be approved by designated persons before they can be emailed or printed for sending by mail to the supplier. You can configure the approval process with approvals to be performed in parallel by multiple employees or in multiple successive stages. The rules for automatic assignment of orders for approval can be based on the type of order, supplier information, order amount, and other order-specific information.

Processing of drop-ship orders

Drop shipping is a type of sales order fulfilment in which the customers order goods from your company, receive them directly from a supplier (wholesaler or manufacturer), and send payments for the orders to your company. The quantities of stock items on drop-ship orders do not update the item availability data in the Inventory workspace.

The functionality that allows processing of drop-ship orders is available only if the Drop shipments functionality is enabled in the Enable/disable functionalities (CS100000) window. For details, see: Create a drop-ship order flow.

Processing of returns

For damaged goods or services not rendered, you can create returns. To a return, you can add a purchase order, add order lines, or specify the items with their quantities manually. You can configure the system on release of returns to automatically create Inventory issues for stock items. Further processing of returns depend on the policies established in your company: You can choose whether to create a purchase credit note and later apply it against a refund or against other invoices, or to later create a new receipt for replacements of damaged items. For details, see: About return processing options.

Support of collect on delivery purchases

The type of purchasing transaction for which a buyer pays at the time of delivery is generally referred to as cash on delivery (COD) or (because there are multiple possible methods of payment) collect on delivery (COD). Visma Net provides you with the functionality that you can use to account for payments made on delivery. For information on a workflow used for processing COD transactions, see: Process a cash-on-delivery (COD) transaction.

Landed cost tracking

By using the Purchases workspace, you can account for additional costs that your company can incur in the process of purchasing goods, such as transportation costs, VAT, shipment insurances, and other charges. For information about how landed costs are processed in Visma Net, see: About landed cost application scenarios.

Bar code support

Scanning product bar codes on receipt of goods to warehouses simplifies data entry. By using warehouse and location IDs printed as bar codes and scanned on data entry, you can more easily maintain correct item allocation data, which helps your employees effectively fulfil orders. For more information, see: About bar code support.

Inclusive VAT support

In Visma Net, you can configure automatic calculation of value-added taxes (VATs) included in item prices. This functionality is only available if the VAT reporting functionality is enabled in the Enable/disable functionalities (CS100000) window. VAT amounts will be calculated appropriately, recorded to proper VAT claimable accounts, and excluded from item costs. For details, see: About inclusive VAT support.

Audit trail

The Purchases workspace provides a complete audit trail of all purchasing transactions. After a transaction is released, it cannot be deleted; to correct mistakes, you must enter a transaction to reverse the incorrect entry. The system keeps the details of all purchasing transactions, including information about users who entered, approved, and modified records. Also, you can attach scanned copies of original documents and notes directly to the documents.

Other functionalities and options

The Purchases workspace also offers the following functionalities:

• Integration with the Inventory workspace: You can purchase goods for inventory, and when the goods are received at the warehouse and the purchase receipts are released, the system automatically generates inventory receipts.
• The ability to attach scanned images of supplier documents or images of items received from supplier to receipts or returns.
• The ability to add notes with handling instructions to receipts.
• The option to link receipts to purchase orders or to specific lines of a purchase order to easily trace the process of purchase order fulfilment.
• Support of non-stock items on purchase receipts.
• Automatic conversion of units of measure (and resulting item costs).
• The ability to specify service charges and shipping and handling fees on purchase orders and receipts.
• Automatic printing of purchase orders to further send them to suppliers by mail, or automatic emailing of such orders.
• Automatic update of item costs, depending on the valuation methods chosen for stock items, with supplier prices specified on purchase receipts.
• Convenient display of item availability information in the window when users create purchase orders.
• Automatic calculation of VAT on purchases, depending on the VAT zone of the shipping location.