Inventory

The Inventory page holds your parts catalog, the vendors that supply it, and the purchase orders that restock it. Its core idea is one-motion receiving: when a delivery arrives you enter how many came and what they actually cost, and BayDocket updates both the on-hand count and the part’s cost together — that cost then flows into estimates and the parts-margin figure on Reports with no retyping.

Open Inventory in the sidebar. The page has three tabs: Parts, Vendors, and Purchase orders.

Role note: Inventory is an Owner and Advisor surface. Technicians do not see the Inventory page at all.

The parts catalog

The Parts tab lists every active part with its part number, on-hand count, cost, price, and default vendor. Click a row to edit it in place — change a field, then click Save (or press Enter); Cancel or Escape discards the edit.

The parts catalog. A negative on-hand count renders in red — the shop is short, but nothing is blocked.

Add a part

1. Click New part.
2. Enter a Part name and a Price. Part #, On hand, Cost (blank = unknown), and Vendor are optional.
3. Click Add part.

Note: a blank cost means “unknown” and shows as a dash — it is deliberately not $0.00, because zero means genuinely free. You do not have to research costs up front; receiving purchase orders fills them in with real numbers over time.

Two more things worth knowing about the catalog:

• Editing the on-hand count records an adjustment. When you type a new quantity, BayDocket records the difference against the current count as a stock adjustment — a deliberate correction, never a silent overwrite.
• Archive, not delete. The Archive action removes a part from the table and from the estimate builder’s suggestions, but old estimate lines and purchase orders that reference it are untouched.

Vendors

The Vendors tab is a simple list of your suppliers. Click New vendor, enter a name (phone, email, and notes are optional), and click Add vendor. Click a row to edit it; Archive hides a vendor from pickers while keeping it on the purchase orders it already appears on.

Purchase orders

Create and order

1. On the Purchase orders tab, click New PO.
2. Choose the Vendor, then add lines: pick a Part, set the Qty, and check the Unit cost — it prefills with the part’s current cost and you can change it. Click Add line for more rows.
3. Click Create PO. The order starts as a Draft and gets a number automatically (PO-000042 style).
4. While it is a Draft you can open it, change the lines, and click Save lines. When you place the order with the vendor, click Mark ordered.

You can Cancel PO from Draft or Ordered. Canceling stops future receiving; anything already received stays on the books — it is not an undo.

Receive a delivery

This is the step the whole feature is built around. Open an Ordered purchase order and the Receive panel lists every line that still has quantity owed, prefilled with the remaining count and the ordered cost.

1. For each line that arrived, enter Qty now — how many came in this delivery.
2. Check Actual unit cost — if the vendor’s invoice priced it differently from the order, type what you actually paid. The real number wins.
3. Click Receive.

Receiving a purchase order. ① Qty now — how many arrived in this delivery. ② Actual unit cost — what they really cost; this becomes the part’s latest cost.

In that one step, each received line raises the part’s on-hand count and the cost you entered becomes the part’s latest cost — the number the catalog shows and the estimate builder prefills from then on. The lines table shows Received / ordered progress plus both an Ordered cost and a Latest cost column, so after receiving at a different price you can see the two diverge; the original paperwork is never rewritten.

Partial deliveries are normal:

• Leave a line’s Qty now blank or at 0 to skip it this time. A backordered line just sits at, say, 3 of 10 received until the rest shows up.
• The order flips to Received on its own once every line is fully covered.

Note: receiving more than you ordered is legal — if the vendor ships 11 of 10, enter 11. The stock count should tell the truth, not match the paperwork.

Catalog parts on an estimate

In the estimate builder, start typing in a new part line’s name or part-number field and matching catalog parts drop down, each showing its name, part number, and price. Pick one and the line fills in the name, part number, cost, and price, and links to the catalog part.

Typing in a part line’s name field surfaces catalog matches — picking one prefills the line and links it to the part.

The line is a copy of the catalog part at that moment: editing the catalog later never changes the estimate, and editing the estimate never changes the catalog. If you retype the name or part number after picking, the link is removed — so you can never silently draw down stock for a different part than the one written on the estimate. Changing the quantity, price, or cost keeps the link.

Free-typed part lines are still completely normal: no link, no stock effect. The optional Cost $ field on a part line follows the same rule as the catalog — blank means unknown.

Note: the suggestions appear only while adding a new line; an existing line cannot be linked to the catalog afterward. Lines created by applying a canned job or promoting an inspection finding are not linked either.

When stock actually moves

Putting a catalog part on an estimate does not touch stock. The count changes when money does:

• Generating the invoice consumes stock. Each catalog-linked part line on an approved job reduces on-hand by its quantity. Declined jobs are never invoiced, so they never consume anything.
• Reopening an invoice puts it back. The exact quantities the invoice recorded are restored; if you edit and generate a new invoice, the then-current lines are consumed. See Invoices and payments.
• Going negative is allowed. A short shop can always finish invoicing — the count turns red in the catalog to tell you, but it never blocks the sale.

Parts margin on Reports

When an invoice is generated, each part line’s cost is frozen onto it. The Parts margin figure on Reports is computed from those frozen costs, so a later catalog cost change never rewrites a past period. Lines with an unknown cost are left out of the math, and the tile says how much of the period’s parts revenue the figure actually covers — for example, “margin on 84% of parts revenue”. Coverage climbs as receiving fills real costs into the catalog.

Role note: the Reports page is Owner-only, so only the Owner sees the parts-margin figure. Inventory itself — catalog, vendors, and purchase orders — is open to Advisors too.

Tip: you do not need to load the whole catalog before using it. Add parts as you order them, receive the deliveries, and within a few weeks the catalog carries real costs, live counts, and a margin number you can trust.