Hi everyone! I'm new to this forum and wanted to share something I've been setting up over the last couple of days. A friend of mine has a small wine trading business and has been using an excel sheet I've set up for keeping track of purchases, sales and inventory management. This setup is pretty fragile.
For my personal finances I've been using hledger for almost two years now and I really like it! That got me thinking if I could somehow set something up for my friend. Just as an experiment. My friend isn't very tech savvy and I don't expect her to use the hledger setup I've come up with.
You can find the github repository here:
https://github.com/javroegop/hledger-inventory
The way it works:
- Each product has to be set up as a commodity
- There three flows:
- Supplier -> InTransit -> Inbound dock -> Bin (storage location)
- Bin -> Outbound staging -> Shipped -> Delivered/Invoiced (AR) -> Paid
- Any stage -> broken/damaged -> written off
Each stage is its own account under Assets:Inventory:..., so a hledger balance on that account tree shows exactly how much stock is at each step and where it physically sits (which bin, in transit, shipped, etc).
The transactions have been grouped in the following journals:
- purchasing.journal (buying products from suppliers
- invoicing.journal (selling products to customers)
- transfers.journal (inventory movement)
- damaged.journal (for any breakage, lost inventory...)
- prices.journal (for setting market prices)
- main.journal (ties it all together, sets up accounts and commodities)
The python script inventory_report.py can be used to get an overview of the current inventory counts, purchase value and market value.
I probably went a little overboard with the way I've set up the accounts but I think it would work for a small company trading in a small collection of products. I just wanted to share it with the pta community and I would love to hear your feed-back.