Vendors and purchase invoices
Updated
On this page
Sidebar: Vendors.
This is the money going out — shampoo, food, bedding, equipment. It is the half of the picture most pet businesses only assemble at year end, when it is too late to act on.
Vendors
Add each supplier with their contact details. Mark ones you no longer use as inactive rather than deleting them, so past spend stays attributed.
Purchase invoices
Record supplier invoices against a vendor with the amount, the date, and whether they are pending or paid.
You do not need to itemise every line. The value is in knowing you spent £340 with your food supplier in March, not in reproducing their invoice.
Spend
The Invoices & Spend view totals what you have recorded per vendor. That is the number worth looking at each quarter — it is how you notice that consumables have crept up 30% while your prices have not moved.
What this is not
- Not stock control. Recording a purchase invoice for forty bags of food does not add them to your product inventory. Stock levels are managed under Products — see Products, stock and low-stock alerts.
- Not accounts payable. Marking an invoice paid records that you paid it; it does not pay it, and it does not connect to your bank.
- Not a substitute for your accounts. Your accountant still needs the actual invoices. Keep the paperwork.
Practical advice
- Record as they arrive. Ten minutes a week beats a day in January.
- Be consistent with vendor names. "Pets at Home", "PAH" and "Pets@Home" as three vendors makes the spend report useless.
- Include the boring ones — waste collection, laundry, utilities if you can attribute them. The unglamorous recurring costs are usually where the money goes.
- Look at spend against revenue quarterly. Reports gives you what came in; this gives you what went out. Neither is much use alone.