Suppliers is a report on your buying, not a place to keep supplier records. It answers: how much cost went onto orders, for which supplier, on which day, and who added it.
One thing to get straight before reading it: cost counts on the day it was first added to the order, not the day the order was placed. This is a report on your data entry as much as your buying.
The four figures
| Tile | What it counts |
|---|---|
| Cost added | Total buying cost recorded in the period |
| Orders costed | How many orders got a price, plus how many stock batches were added |
| Units | Units covered, with the average cost per unit |
| Waiting for the cost | Orders placed in the period with no cost added yet. Amber when it is not zero, and it links straight to the queue for those dates. |
The default period is the last 7 days; there is a period selector in the header.
By supplier
A table of supplier, orders, units, cost, average unit cost, share of your spend and how many products, biggest spend first. Click a supplier and its row is marked and Cost added by date below narrows to that supplier alone; click it again, or Show all suppliers, to clear. The four tiles and this table always show the whole period, so you can still compare one supplier against the rest.
Unknown supplier is a row like any other, tinted amber and tagged "needs a name", so the splits always add up to the total rather than quietly losing money you did not label. Open it and you get the individual purchases, with a note: select the lines that came from the same supplier and name it. The cost itself does not change — you are labelling, not editing.
Cost added by date
The daily costing table: one row per day, newest first, with what was costed that day.
| Column | What it shows |
|---|---|
| Day | The day the cost was added — not the day the order was placed |
| Orders | Orders costed that day, plus any stock batches added ("4 + 1 stock") |
| Units and Cost | Units covered and the money they came to |
| Suppliers | That day's cost split by supplier, biggest first. Cost with no supplier shows in amber as Unknown supplier. |
| Added by | Who entered it, with their share of the cost and how many orders — useful when a VA does your costing |
| Waiting for the cost | Orders placed that day that still have no cost. The number links to the queue for that day. |
View on a day opens its cost line by line, right under the row, without leaving the page: the time, the eBay order, the item and SKU, the supplier and supplier order number, quantity, unit cost, total and who added it. Open as many days as you like to compare them; View again closes one.
A window of two weeks or less shows every day, including the empty ones — a day where nothing was costed is exactly the thing you want to notice. Longer windows drop the empty days and say so.
With a supplier picked, the table is that supplier's days only — the heading reads Cost added by date · Meridian Wholesale, for example — and the Suppliers and Waiting columns drop out, since both are about every supplier at once.
Supplier order numbers
You can record a supplier reference anywhere you record a price: in the order drawer, shared across a multi-product order (with per-line overrides), in the bulk bar, in spreadsheet mode, in a CSV import, and on a stock batch.
Turn on the Supplier order # column on the Orders page and each one gets a copy button. That is the whole point of it: checking your supplier's tracking a few days later should not mean opening every order's drawer to copy a number out.
Supplier order numbers are also searchable from the Orders search box.