Price Request from the Supplier

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23.1.8 Price Revisions

OpenERP supports several methods of calculating and automatically updating product costs: • Standard Price: manually fixed, and • Standard Price: revalued automatically and periodically, • Average Price: updated at each receipt to the warehouse. This cost is used to value your stock and represents your product costs. Included in that cost is everything directly related to the received cost. You could include such elements as: • supplier price, • delivery charges, • manufacturing costs, • storage charges. Standard Price The mode of price management for the product is shown in the tab Information on the product form. On each individual product, you can select if you want to work in Standard Price or on weighted Average Price . Tip: Simplified Interface If you work in the Simplified interface mode you will not see the field that lets you manage the price calcula- tion mode for a product. In that case, the default value is Standard Price. The Standard Price setting means that the product cost is fixed manually for each product in the field Cost Price . This is usually revalued once a year based on the average of purchase costs or manufacturing costs. You usually use standard costs to manage products where the price hardly changes over the course of the year. For example, the standard cost could be used to manage books, or the cost of bread. Those costs that can be fixed for the whole year bring certain advantages: • you can base the sale price on the product cost and then work with margins rather than a fixed price per product, • accounting is simplified because there is a direct relationship between the value of stock and the number of items received. To get an automated periodic revaluation of the standard price you can use the action Update on the product form, enabling you to update prices of all the selected products. OpenERP then recalculates the price of the products as a function of the cost of raw materials and the manufacturing operations given in the routing. Average Price Working with standard prices does not lend itself well to the management of the cost price of products when the prices change a lot with the state of the market. This is the case for many commodities and energy. In this case, you would want OpenERP to automatically set the price in response to each goods receipt movement into the warehouse. The deliveries exit from stock have no impact on the product price. 363 Tip: Calculating the price At each goods receipt, the product price is recalculated using the following accounting formula: NP = OP QS + PP QR QS + QR, where the following notation is used: • NP: New Price, • OP: Old Price, • QS: Quantity actually in Stock, • PP: Price Paid for the quantity received, • QR: Quantity Received. If the products are managed as a weighted average, OpenERP will open a window that lets you specify the price of the product received at each goods receipt. The purchase price is, by default, set from the purchase order, but you can change the price to add the cost of delivery to the various received products, for example. Figure 23.8: Goods receipt of products managed in weighted average Once the receipt has been confirmed, the price is automatically recalculated and entered on the product form.

23.2 Purchase Analysis

23.2.1 Elementary Statistics

OpenERP enables you to perform analysis of purchases by period current year, current month, previous month, by state quotations, orders, supplier, user, product, category, warehouse and so on. This is made possible through a search view accessed through the menu Purchases → Reporting → Purchase Analysis Figure 23.9: Analysis of purchases over the month by product This analysis is carried out on supplier orders and not on invoices or the quantities actually received. To get an analysis by product, use the module product_margin. The function of this module is described in detail in the chapter Driving your Sales . To analyze the received quantities, you can use the statistical reports in Warehouse. 364

23.3 Analytic Accounts

To manage purchases by project, you should use analytic accounts. You can set an analytic account on each line of a supplier order. The analytic costs linked to this purchase will be managed by OpenERP from the goods receipt and confirmation of the supplier invoice. The hr_timesheet_invoice module lets you re-invoice the analytic costs automatically using parameters in the analytic accounts such as sale pricelist, associated partner company, and maximum amount. So you can put an invoice order with a defined invoice workflow in place based on the analytic accounts. If you are working Make to Order, the workflow will be: 1. Customer Order, 2. Procurement Order on supplier, 3. Receive invoice and goods from the supplier, 4. Delivery and invoicing to the customer. When re-invoicing based on costs you would get the following workflow: 1. Enter the customer contract conditions from the analytic accounts, 2. Purchase raw materials and write the services performed into the timesheets, 3. Receive the supplier invoice and the products, 4. Invoice these costs to the customer. Tip: Analytic Multi-plans If you want several analysis plans, you should install the module purchase_analytic_plans. These let you split a line on a supplier purchase order into several accounts and analytic plans. Look back at Analytic Accounts for more information on the use of analytic accounts. 365 Part VIII Process and Document Management 367 CHAPTER TWENTYFOUR PROCESS If you have reached this far in the book, your mind may well be reeling with the number of new documents based on business objects and processes that you need to encounter to model and manage your business. OpenERP’s process module, which is installed automatically when a process-aware module is installed, shows you cross-functional processes and technical workflows for those nodes in the process that have them. This visualization is invaluable for documentation - but it also goes a step further. You can modify processes and workflows and even generate entirely new processes and workflows for your various document types. If your starting point is a specific document, such as an invoice or order, then you will also be shown the exact position of that document on its process and workflow diagrams. For this chapter you should start with a fresh database that includes demonstration data, with sale and its dependencies installed and no particular chart of accounts configured. process is one of those dependencies. Also install some of the hr modules for the second example in this chapter, such as hr_attendance, hr_contract , and hr_holidays.

24.1 Process Integration in the Management System

Processes are at the heart of a company: they form a structure for all activities that enable the company to function effectively. A company’s human dimension is often disconnected from its processes at the moment, preventing individual employees’ aspirations from being directed towards a collective objective. From a mapping process, integrating management and the changing needs of each employee becomes very useful for the fulfilment of each. Based on that, each employee becomes aware of his own personal contribution to the company’s value chain. This representation also helps an employee’s own personal management because it shows his place and his role in the overall process, very often over several departments. The system of ‘Corporate Intelligence’ will also be highly useful to system implementers who, after studying the requirements, have to formalize a company’s processes to put them into operation in OpenERP.

24.1.1 Examples of Process

To understand the aims of the system of Corporate Intelligence process better, you will now see an overview of the functions available to you in a the study of two processes: • A customer order quotation, • The engagement of a new employee.