Stock and purchasing

What it does

This covers everything between deciding you need something and having it on the shelf with the invoice reconciled: requesting it, getting prices, ordering, receiving, and keeping the count accurate afterwards.

Both the purchasing side and the stock side are fully available — settled parts of the platform, not early-access ones.

Purchasing runs as a chain of documents, each one able to create the next: a material request says something is needed, a request for quotation asks suppliers what they'd charge, their supplier quotations come back, a purchase order commits to one, a purchase receipt records what actually turned up, and a purchase invoice is what you pay against. You don't have to use every step — a straightforward reorder can start at the purchase order — but the chain exists so each document carries its history.

Alongside it sits everything that makes those documents correct: suppliers and supplier groups, items, item groups, price lists and item prices, pricing rules, product bundles, and purchase tax templates. Supplier scorecards track how suppliers actually perform against criteria you set, rather than leaving it to memory.

Stock is the counting half. Stock entries move goods; delivery notes send them out; purchase receipts bring them in; pick lists gather what an order needs; delivery trips group deliveries together. Warehouses, units of measure and conversion factors, item variants and attributes, and brands describe how your stock is organized.

Where you need to track individual units rather than quantities, serial numbers and batches do that, with traceability, ledgers, and expiry and warranty tracking attached. Stock reconciliation corrects a count against what's physically there, and landed cost vouchers spread freight and duty across the items they apply to, so the cost you hold is the real one.

Quality sits alongside it: quality inspections against received or produced goods, plus the wider quality record — non conformances, reviews, actions, goals, procedures and the feedback captured against them.

When to use it

• Something needs ordering. Start at a material request if it needs approving or consolidating; start at a purchase order if you already know what you're buying and from whom.
• You want prices before committing. A request for quotation goes out, supplier quotations come back, and they can be compared side by side before one becomes an order.
• Goods arrive. A purchase receipt records what actually came, which is the point at which stock goes up — not when the order was placed.
• The count is wrong. Stock reconciliation is the correcting document. Do not fix a count by inventing a stock entry.
• Freight or duty needs spreading across a shipment. A landed cost voucher does that, so item cost reflects what the goods really cost to land.
• You need to know what to reorder. The stock reports answer it — shortages, projected quantity, recommended reorder levels, and what's been requested but not yet transferred.
• Something is tracked individually. Serial numbers and batches, with expiry and warranty visible against each one.

How to use it

Ask for what you want in a sentence and Rufio prepares the right document — it knows that receiving goods means a purchase receipt and that correcting a count means a reconciliation, so you don't have to name the document to get the right one.

The chain matters more than the individual step. Because each document can create the next, raising a purchase order from an approved material request carries the items, quantities and context forward rather than making you retype them, and the resulting receipt and invoice stay linked to the order they came from. That linkage is what makes the reports trustworthy later.

At Suggest, Rufio prepares the document and waits for your approval before submission. You may want to keep purchase orders at approval while authorizing specific receiving or counting routines. Choose the permissions for each task around your process; there is no requirement to increase automation. See Autonomy levels.

Parameters

What Rufio needs from you. Your items, and how they're organized — item groups, units of measure, and any conversion factors between them. A unit of measure that's wrong makes every quantity downstream wrong.

Your suppliers, and which of them you buy what from.

Your warehouses, if stock lives in more than one place. Stock movements are between warehouses, so the answer to "how much do we have" depends on them being right.

Your prices: price lists, item prices, and any pricing rules that vary them. Rufio applies these; it does not decide what you pay or charge.

For approvals, where the gate goes and whose it is — which purchases need signing off, and above what value.

For tracked items, whether they're tracked by serial number or by batch. This is decided per item and is hard to change once there's history behind it, so it's worth getting right at the start.

What you get back

A prepared document of the right type, linked to whatever it came from, waiting for you to submit it.

For a question about stock, a real answer from the ledger — what's on hand, what's committed, what's projected, and where it is — rather than a number you then verify by walking the racks.

For receiving, stock that goes up when goods actually arrive, with the receipt tied to the order and the invoice.

For a reconciliation, the correction recorded as a correction, so the ledger shows what happened rather than quietly showing a different number than it did yesterday.

For serial or batch tracked items, the trail: where a specific unit came from, where it went, and when it expires or goes out of warranty.

Limits

Rufio does not pay suppliers. A purchase invoice can be prepared and matched, but paying it is yours — no autonomy level changes that, and it is one of the hard limits.

It does not commit you to a supplier. A purchase order waits for you at Suggest, and that default exists precisely because submitting one is a commitment.

It does not decide what to pay. Prices come from your price lists and pricing rules.

It does not silently correct a count. A discrepancy becomes a reconciliation you can see, not an adjustment that makes the difference disappear.

It cannot tell you about stock it was never told about. Goods received without a receipt, or moved without an entry, are invisible to every report on this page — the ledger is only as good as what gets recorded into it.

Related

• Money — purchase invoices, what you owe, and the financial records behind them
• Work and scheduling — the jobs that consume stock
• Customers and sales — the sales side, where delivery notes send goods out
• Automation and reports — reorder-level monitoring and scheduled stock reports
• Autonomy levels — why purchasing and counting tend to sit at different levels
• Every capability — the full list, and how settled each area is