Purchase orders, goods-in and what stock really cost you
Raise an order, receive against it, and carry the freight and duty into the cost of the goods rather than losing them in overheads.
You know what you paid the supplier. You do not really know what the stock cost you once shipping, duty and handling are in — so your margins are optimistic by an amount nobody has measured.
Most small merchants buy stock on email and a spreadsheet, and it works until two things happen at once: a delivery arrives short, and someone asks what your gross margin actually is. Both questions need the same record, and email is not it.
An order you can receive against
A purchase order lists what you asked for, at what price, from whom. Goods-in is checked against that line by line, so a short delivery is visible as a difference rather than as a stock figure that quietly never arrived.
Receiving is what creates the stock movement, which means your levels go up when the goods land rather than when the order was raised. That distinction matters more than it sounds — stock you have ordered is not stock you can sell, and treating it as though it were is a direct route to overselling.
Landed cost, which is the number that matters
The supplier invoice is not what the stock cost you. Freight, duty, insurance and handling are real and they are frequently a double-digit percentage on imported goods. Left in overheads, they make every product look more profitable than it is, and they make the cheap-looking overseas supplier look better than the domestic one who quoted delivered.
Costs are recorded against the purchase order and carried into the cost of the goods it brought in. So the margin you see on a product is a margin you can trust, and two suppliers can be compared on the same basis.
Suppliers as records, not addresses
A supplier carries their terms, their contacts and their history — what you have bought, at what prices, and how the deliveries went. That history is the thing that makes a renegotiation possible; “you have had £40,000 from us this year” is an argument, and “we buy a fair bit from you” is not.
Where it stops
This is purchasing, not demand planning. Qwikr will not forecast what you should buy, model seasonality, or work out reorder points across a supply chain. It records what you bought, what it truly cost, and what arrived.
If you need forecasting across a multi-echelon supply chain, this is the commerce layer that sits in front of that — not a replacement for it. Being clear about that now is better than you discovering it in month three.
Stop reconciling stock by hand
One catalogue, six channels, one stock figure that stays right.