Types of Purchases

Purchase any type of good or service through the use of parts and purchases.

Our customers purchase various goods and services, including inventoried items, physical services like anodizing or heat treatment, software and digital services, office equipment and supplies, capital assets, and more! These can be summed up into four main types of purchase order lines within ION.

Creates Inventory

For purchases where you need to procure inventoried items, items you need to track, move, install, create issues against, etc., set the part for that purchase to a Purchase Type of Creates inventory. Use this for all parts that end up on your final product(s). Below is a picture from the parts screen.

Purchase Type of Creates Inventory

These lines will be able to be received, and will automatically generate inventory that is on order when you create a purchase order line that calls out that part.

Does Not Create Inventory, Physically Received

Businesses often procure materials other than manufacturing parts like office furniture, anodizing services, heat treatments, tests, etc. These are items or services that need to be purchased AND received, but are not tracked in inventory and often do not show up on the general ledger. In ERP systems like NetSuite, these are tracked as a separate item type called non-inventory parts. ION now allows you to create, manage, and purchase goods and services that need to be received and do not create inventory in two ways:

You can see here that for the first two lines, both of which do not need inventory, there are no sub-lines, which denotes the lack of inventory.

For Common Purchases:

Set a part's Purchase Type to Does Not Create Inventory, Physically Received. This will allow you to quickly purchase that good or service repeatedly, and will ensure when you put the part on a purchase order line, that it will not create inventory.

For Uncommon Purchases:

Set a PO line's description only to describe the service. Without a part listed on the PO line, this will function as a non-inventoried purchase line that can be physically received

PO line with no part but has a description defaults to not creating inventory but is physically received.

Does Not Create Inventory, Digitally Received

The last type of purchase line is for purchases where you are not physically receiving anything; therefore, no ION receipt is required. A common type of this purchase would be software.

For these, set the part Purchase Type to be Does Not Create Inventory, Digitally Received.

Part Setup

How do I change the purchase type of a part?

1. Navigate to ION's part library and press Create part.

2. In the create part modal, type in the part information and change the Purchase Type to be one of the following three options as described above.

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3. Press "Create Part"

Updating a part:

You can edit a non-inventory part to make it inventoried so that future purchase orders containing that part will create inventory. The change WILL NOT change previously created purchase order lines with that former non-inventory part on it.