Creating products and their categories

82 company although it can be; you can easily specify another partner who may be holding stock on your behalf. Note: Location Structure Each warehouse is composed of three locations Location Input, Location Output, and Location Stock. Your available stock is given by the contents of the Location Stock and its child locations. So the Location Input can be placed as a child of the Location Stock, which means that when Location Stock is interrogated for product quantities, it also takes account of the contents of the Location Input. Location Input could be used as a goods-in QC location. The Location Output must never be placed as a child of Location Stock, since items in Location Output, which can be considered to be packed ready for customer shipment, should not be thought of as available for sale elsewhere.

8.5.7 Setting up a chart of accounts

You can set up a chart of accounts during the creation of a database, but for this exercise you will start with the minimal chart that you created just a handful of required accounts without hierarchy, tax or subtotals. A number of account charts have been predefined for Open ERP, some of which meet the needs of national authorities the number of those created for Open ERP is growing as various contributors create and freely publish them. You can take one of those without changing it if it is suitable, or you can take anything as your starting point and design a complete chart of accounts to meet your exact needs, including accounts for inventory, asset depreciation, equity and taxation. You can also run multiple charts of accounts in parallel – so you can put all of your transaction accounts into several charts, with different arrangements for taxation and depreciation, aggregated differently for various needs. Before you can use any chart of accounts for anything you need to specify a Fiscal Year. This defines the dif- ferent time periods available for accounting transactions. An initial Fiscal Year was created during the database setup so you do not need to do any more on this. You can also create Fiscal year manually from Accounting → Configuration → Financial Accounting → Periods → Fiscal Years Click Accounting → Charts → Charts of Accounts to open a Chart of Accounts form where you define exactly what you want to see. Click Open Charts to accept the defaults and see a hierarchical structure of the accounts.

8.5.8 Make a backup of the database

If you know the super-administrator password, make a backup of your database using the procedure described at the very end of Installation and Initial Setup . Then restore it to a new database: testing . This operation enables you to test the new configuration on testing so that you can be sure everything works as designed. Then if the tests are successful you can make a new database from openerp_ch03 , perhaps called live or production, for your real work. From here on, connect to this new testing database logged in as admin if you can. If you have to make corrections, do that on openerp_ch03 and copy it to a new testing database to continue checking it. Or you can just continue working with the openerp_ch03 database to get through this chapter. You can recreate openerp_ch03 quite quickly if something goes wrong and you cannot recover from it but, again, you would need to know your super-administrator password for that.

8.6 Driving a Purchase Sales Flow

To familiarize yourself with the system workflow you will test a purchase-sale workflow in two phases. The first consists of product purchase, which requires the following operations: 1. Place a purchase order with Plumbing Component Suppliers for 10 Titanium Alloy Radiators at a unit price of 56.00. 2. Receive these products at your Goods In. 83 3. Generate a purchase invoice. 4. Pay your supplier. Following this, you will sell some of these products, using this sequence: 1. Receive a sales order for 6 Titanium Alloy Radiators from Smith and Sons, sold at a unit price of 130.00. 2. Despatch the products. 3. Invoice the customer. 4. Receive the payment.

8.6.1 Purchase Order

To place a Purchase Order with your supplier, use the menu Purchases → Purchase Management → Purchase Orders and click on New button. Complete the following field: • Supplier : Plumbing Component Suppliers . As you complete the Supplier field, Open ERP automatically completes the Address field and the Price List field from information it takes out of the Partner record. Enter the following information • Product : Titanium Alloy Radiator - type in part of this name then press the tab key to complete it, or click the Search icon at the end of the line to bring a search box. if product is previously configured When you have selected a product on the product line, Open ERP automatically completes the following fields from information it finds in the Product record: • Product UOM : the unit of measure for this product, • Description : the detailed description of the product, • Scheduled date : based on the product lead time, • Unit price : the unit price of the product, • Analytic account : if any account is specified then it will appear on the order line it is not in this example, • Taxes : applicable taxes defined in the partner, if specified, otherwise in the product, if specified there are not any in this example. You can edit any of these fields to suit the requirements of the purchase order at the time of entry. Change the: • Quantity : 10, • Unit Price to 56.00. Save the order line and close the Order Line window by clicking the Close button. You can then confirm the whole one-line order by clicking Save, which makes the form non-editable. It is now in a state of Request for Quotation, so click Convert to Purchase Order, which corresponds to an approval from a manager or from Accounts within your own company and moves the order into Confirmedstate. Finally click Approved by Supplier to indicate the supplier’s acknowledgment of the order. The order becomes Approved . If you click the Delivery Invoices tab you will see the delivery Destination is your own company’s Stock location and that the invoice was created from the order. It is not entirely obvious at this stage, but the invoice is in a draft state so it can be edited and, crucially, has no accounting impact yet: it is just ready for your accounting group to activate it.