Hi there,
I was wondering if OpenBoxes has the ability to produce financial reports. Are we able to add costs to items received and able to identify valuation movement and distribution?
Thank you,
Sara
Hey Sara
TL;DR: We provide enough accounting features to give you a pretty good estimate on the valuation of your stock and we could easily add financial data to our transaction-level reports.
I was wondering if OpenBoxes has the ability to produce financial reports.
The short answer is yes. The longer answer is that the accounting features of OpenBoxes are admittedly (and purposefully) crude (at least at the moment). We want users to be able to get an estimate on the value of their stock, but we don’t really want to build a full-fledged accounting system because that would extend us beyond what we’re comfortable with at the moment. With that said, we have plans to integrate with accounting systems (e.g. QuickBooks) and ERPs (e.g. ERPNext) to provide a more comprehensive financial picture of your organization.
Here’s what you can do
You can set a “price per unit” for each product you create / receive. At the moment, we use “price per unit” to signify the price paid for the item (i.e. cost). From there, most of the inventory reports include cost / total value. See the “In Stock” report below.
You can edit this price or you can let the system update the value when Purchase Orders are placed, at which point we use a configurable costing method to assign the cost per unit based on the cost in the PO line. At the moment, I believe we use a Most Recent Cost costing method, but we could implement other algorithms like Average Cost.
If you need something more complex than that (e.g. LIFO/FIFO) we’d be happy to discuss your requirements and see if there’s a way to make it work.
Are we able to add costs to items received and able to identify valuation movement and distribution?
It would be trivial to add unit cost and total value to any report that includes quantity so I’d say yes even though we don’t currently do that. In addition, we could create a custom report if our current “movement” reports don’t meet your needs.
In addition, I’ll be adding a custom CSV export feature in v0.8.15 so if you have some experience with SQL you should be able to write your own query to generate your own financial reports.
As a follow up, I wanted to include a screenshot of our current Development Roadmap. As you’ll see we have lots of accounting improvements on the horizon (including invoices, better cost management, manage POs by organization, PO dashboard).
Please let us know if you have any requirements that you’d like us to consider.
Justin