Taking on Stock with Unit Costs

Normally costs are not keyed with a stock take. Any adjustments for variations are costed automatically and as applies with other stock transactions such as sales.

Note: Adjustments to stock value (rather than stock quantities) are accommodated separately from stock take under the menu item Transactions > Stock > Manual Stock Movements > New > Average Cost Adjustment.

When taking on stock such as during initial database setup or creating a new stock location after a company acquisition (or similar) the database will not have an existing unit cost to apply to the stock being taken on. It is therefore convenient to key or import a unit cost along with the quantities.  

To do this you must first check the Initialise cost prices checkbox from Stock take > Options.

When keying stock take count quantities, an additional Unit Cost column will be present and the cost for each item may be entered.

This cost is stored with the stock take data and will be used as the unit cost of the variance stock transaction when the stock take upload is performed.

The uploaded variance transaction performs the usual average stock calculation.

When posting to an item for which no stock exists for any location the existing value of stock is zero, therefore the average stock calculation will return the same value to STOCK-ITEMS.AVECOST as keyed in the stock take.

When posting to an item that already has stock (e.g. from pre-existing stock or an upload from another counted location) the average cost will be calculated taking the stock value for the variance posting at the keyed unit cost and averaging it with the pre-existing stock at STOCK-ITEMS.AVECOST.

Unit costs may also be used with the stock take import. In the stock take import window check the Expect Unit Cost option to indicate that the import file contains this extra column.

When previous quantities for an item exist in the stock take (e.g. from a previous import file or multiple rows for the same item in the current import file) then the unit cost in the stock take for the item will be averaged from the multiple imported entries.