Remembered Rates and Where a Cost Comes From

When you award a quote and leave Remember these rates ticked, the winning price is written down as a dated agreement with that supplier. The next purchase order for the same vendor and item prices itself from the rate you actually negotiated, instead of from a number nobody has looked at in a year.

Where a purchase-order cost comes fromCopy Anchor Link

On the New PO screen, each line's cost is filled in for you and a small line of grey text underneath says where it came from. The full order the console tries — including rates you typed yourself, and what you last actually paid — is written up in Where a Purchase-Order Cost Comes From. In short, and in order of preference:

1. A rate you agreed and recorded yourself, on Purchases → Agreed Prices. This is the only rung you control directly, and it wins over everything below it.
2. A rate a won quote left behind — the price you awarded with this supplier, if you ticked Remember these rates, still inside its validity window.
3. What you last paid — read off a real purchase document. No price list, nobody maintaining it.
4. The vendor's cost list — the standing cost you maintain on the vendor's own record. It carries no unit and no date, so it can fill the box but never warns you about a difference.
5. The item's cost — the catalog's own cost figure, used only when there is nothing supplier-specific.
6. Nothing on file — the field stays empty and you type the cost yourself.

The item's selling price — what you charge your own customers — is never used as a purchase cost, and it never will be.

Type over the figure and your number is left alone: changing supplier, re-picking the item or reloading the page never overwrites something you typed. Once you have typed a different figure, the caption tells you how far off the expected rate you are — and if the gap is big enough, the purchase turns up on Price Variances for somebody to chase.

If a rate you agreed has since lapsed, the hint still mentions it — "last agreed 12.50, expired 31 Mar" — so you know it existed. A lapsed agreement is context, not the price.

You will get no caption at all in three cases, all deliberate: the first time you buy that item from that supplier, when the line is keyed in a different unit from the rate held (a case rate is never divided down to a piece), or when you do not have the View pricing permission.

Seeing the history for a supplierCopy Anchor Link

1. Open Purchases → Vendors and click the supplier.
2. Under the supplier's catalog items you will find Agreed Rates.
3. Pick an item. You get every rate agreed for it, by date: when it was in force, the rate, the unit, how it was agreed, and which document it came from.
4. The row the console would use today is marked In use today. That is not always the newest row — an agreement whose window has closed is history, not the current price.

Two different things on one screenCopy Anchor Link

• The Catalog Items table is the supplier's standing cost list. You maintain it by hand.
• Agreed Rates is what has actually been agreed, observed from the quotes you awarded.

Awarding never overwrites your hand-maintained cost list. A new agreement is always a new dated row, never an edit of an old one, so "what had we agreed in March?" stays answerable.

Where to go nextCopy Anchor Link

• Creating a Purchase Order