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Stock control

Managing invoices

Check a supplier invoice against the document beside it, attach more than one page, handle delivery fees, receive a delivery, and set up the Invoice Inbox to capture invoices automatically.

Managing invoices

The Invoices screen is where supplier deliveries get checked in against what you actually ordered, and where invoices are prepared for export to your accounting software — see Exporting to Xero if you use Xero.

Adding an invoice

You can bring an invoice into Stock three ways:

  • Photograph it when the delivery arrives — Stock reads the invoice or pick-list photo and extracts the line items automatically.
  • Upload a file if you already have the invoice as a PDF or image.
  • Receive it automatically through the Invoice Inbox, if you've connected your supplier email — see below.

Start from New Invoice on the Invoices screen, or pick one of the options under Import to jump straight to uploading a file.

Checking an invoice

Opening an invoice puts the supplier's document on the right and the lines that were read off it on the left, so you can check one against the other without switching screens or printing anything.

The supplier details sit in a strip above the lines rather than in a column beside them: Supplier, Invoice number, Invoice date, Received and Status, with Notes tucked behind a toggle. Putting them across the top is what gives the document its full height. If you use areas, an Area control appears here too.

Between the two halves is a drag handle. Pull it left or right to give more room to whichever side you're working on, and Stock remembers where you left it for next time. You can also nudge it with the arrow keys, jump to either extreme with Home and End, or double-click it to snap back to the default. On a narrow screen or a small window the handle disappears and the document moves below the lines instead.

The lines themselves are Item, Qty, Unit price, Tax and Total. As the pane gets narrower Stock drops the Tax and Total columns and folds their values into the item instead of making you scroll sideways.

What Stock flags for you

Rather than making you read every line looking for the wrong one, Stock marks the ones worth a second look and counts them at the top of Line items as needs attention. Press that counter to bring the flagged lines to the top.

A line can be flagged for any of these:

  • Not matched to a stock item — Stock doesn't know what this is yet.
  • Zero quantity — the quantity didn't read, or is genuinely nil.
  • Price moved sharply since the last purchase — worth checking before you accept it.
  • Total does not match quantity times price — the arithmetic on the line doesn't work out.
  • No readable total — the figure couldn't be read off the document.

If the lines don't add up to the total printed on the invoice, a banner above them says These lines do not add up to the invoice total and tells you by how much. That's usually a line that was missed or a figure misread — the amount tells you which to go looking for.

An invoice that arrived by email is marked Needs review until you've checked it and pressed Mark reviewed.

Attaching several documents

An invoice can hold more than one document — the supplier's PDF, a photo of the signed docket, a picture of a damaged carton — and they're all viewable in the same panel beside the lines.

Use Add page, or drag a file straight onto the document panel. PDFs and photos are both accepted, up to 10 MB each, and a multi-page PDF is fine. Everything attached appears as a strip of thumbnails down the side, one per page, so a three-page PDF gives you three thumbnails to jump between.

You can reorder documents or detach one from the controls beneath its first thumbnail. Detaching happens straight away and can't be undone, so make sure you have the file elsewhere if you might need it again.

If you attach files while creating a brand-new invoice, they're uploaded once you save it. Should any fail, Stock tells you how many so you can add them again.

Delivery fees and other charges

Suppliers bill for things that aren't stock: delivery, freight, a fuel levy, a pallet deposit, a container deposit, an account credit. These used to leave you with two bad options — match the fee to a made-up stock item, which put a fee into your inventory as though it were something on a shelf, or leave it unmatched, where it nagged forever.

Now a fee is its own kind of line, and a fee never becomes a stock item.

Every line carries a small Stock or Charge pill. Press it to switch a line between the two. A Charge line:

  • still counts toward the invoice total — the totals under the lines split into Stock lines and Charges so you can see both, and Total is the whole bill as the supplier wrote it;
  • is never received into stock — receiving a delivery skips it entirely, so a $12.50 delivery fee can never turn into 12.5 of something on a stocktake;
  • stops asking to be matched to a stock item, because there isn't one to match it to.

Turning a recurring fee into a charge

When Stock reads a fee it doesn't recognise, the line offers a Charge item button. Press it and Stock records that fee against the supplier and marks the line as a charge.

The point of doing this is the next invoice: because the fee is now remembered against that supplier, Stock recognises it automatically from then on and you never have to touch it again. It's worth doing once for each fee a supplier bills you for regularly.

You'll need a supplier chosen on the invoice and some text in the line before Stock can save a charge — it tells you if either is missing.

Charges go through to Xero along with everything else on the invoice, coded to their own account — a delivery fee can land in freight while the goods on the same invoice go to purchases. There is nothing to add on the Xero side. See Exporting to Xero.

Receiving and comparing a delivery

Once an invoice has its lines extracted, Stock compares them against the purchase order they belong to and highlights any differences — short deliveries, substitutions, or price changes. For each discrepancy you choose whether to credit it (you were short and want that reflected) or adjust it (you accept what was actually billed). This comparison is what keeps your stock counts and your costs accurate even when a delivery doesn't exactly match what was ordered.

Charge lines sit this out. An invoice counts as fully received once all its stock lines are in, so a delivery fee never leaves an invoice looking half-finished.

How Stock reads pack sizes

A supplier line usually mixes three different things together, and Stock now keeps them apart. On a line like 4 x 12 pk Tin Cottage Sauv Blanc 750ml @ $159.32:

  • 4 x is how many you ordered — that becomes the quantity.
  • 12 pk is part of what the thing is, and stays in the name. A 12-pack and a 6-pack of the same wine are different products, and a name with the pack size stripped out can't tell them apart — which is how the wrong item used to get matched, or a duplicate created.
  • @ $159.32 is the price, which goes in its own column.

So that line comes through as 12 pk Tin Cottage Sauv Blanc 750ml, quantity 4. If a line still reads oddly, edit it directly — anything you type is kept as-is.

Weights and volumes are stored consistently, so kilograms are held as grams and litres as millilitres. A recipe calling for 300 g and a purchase of 2 kg are then talking about the same thing.

Setting up the Invoice Inbox

If your supplier invoices arrive by email, the Invoice Inbox can watch your inbox and pull them into Stock automatically, so nobody has to remember to forward or upload them.

The first time you open it, a short setup wizard walks you through:

  • Connecting your email, if it isn't already connected for this business
  • Choosing which labels or folders to watch
  • Optionally restricting capture to specific senders or domains
  • Filtering by subject or attachment name, if your suppliers send a predictable format
  • How far back to look, and whether an email needs an attachment to count

The wizard reads your actual inbox to suggest real senders and labels, so you're picking from what's really there rather than guessing. You can revisit these rules at any time from Settings, under Invoice Inbox.

Each of these filters is a list you build one entry at a time — type a value, press Enter, and it appears as a removable tag. Add as many as you need; an email only has to match one entry in a list to pass that filter. Leaving a list empty is not a restriction, it's the absence of one: an empty Allowed senders list accepts mail from anyone, and an empty Subject must contain list accepts every subject.

Capitalisation is ignored for senders, subjects and attachment names, so there's no need to add both Invoice and invoice. Labels are the exception — they're passed to your mail provider exactly as you type them, so enter a label the way it actually appears in your mailbox rather than guessing at its capitalisation.