Setting Up and Using Impressed Stock
Impressed Stock is a way of holding a supplier's stock on your shelves without paying for it up front. The items are physically received into your inventory, but they are not invoiced until you actually use or sell them. At an agreed point — usually the end of the month — the supplier sends a single invoice for the quantities you have consumed, and you settle only for those. This is often referred to as consignment stock.
This approach is useful where a supplier wants their products available in your garage, but you only want to be charged for what leaves the shelf. The following describes how to set up Impressed Stock in Garage Hive and how to receive and invoice impressed stock items.
Important: Impressed Stock changes how purchase orders are received and invoiced. Set it up on a test environment first and confirm the process with your accountant before enabling it on your live company.
How Impressed Stock Works
When Impressed Stock is enabled, you receive impressed items onto a purchase order without invoicing them, which leaves the order open with a quantity still to invoice. The stock is available to use straight away. When the supplier later invoices you, you create a purchase invoice and match each line back to the original purchase receipts before posting. Once an order has been both fully received and fully invoiced, a daily background job tidies it away automatically.
Setting Up Impressed Stock
In the top-right corner, choose the search icon, enter Impressed Stock Setup, and select the related link.
The setup page opens. Under Job Queue Cleanup FastTab, turn on Delete Inv. POs Enabled first. This creates the background job that removes purchase orders once they are fully received and fully invoiced.
Set the Job Frequency (Minutes) to control how often the cleanup job runs. The default of 1440 runs the job once a day, which is usually sufficient.
Under the General FastTab, turn on Impressed Stock Enabled to enable the feature.
Mark Items as Impressed Stock
Each item that should follow the impressed stock process must be flagged on its item card.
Open the Item Card for the item you want to use as impressed stock. Turn on the Impressed Stock toggle.
Repeat for every item the supplier provides on an impressed basis.
Note: An item marked as Impressed Stock can only be supplied by one vendor. The first time you invoice that item, the vendor on that invoice becomes its permanent supplier — after that, no other vendor can deliver it as impressed stock.
(Optional) Enable Expected Cost Posting
If you want to keep the value of received-but-not-yet-invoiced stock on separate general ledger accounts — which makes reconciliation easier — you can enable expected cost posting. This is optional and only needed where your accounting procedures requires it.
Open Inventory Setup page and turn on Expected Cost Posting slider.
With expected cost posting on, set up the interim accounts so that uninvoiced stock is held separately:
- In Inventory Posting Setup , set the Inventory (Interim) Account to the account you use for impressed stock items.
- In General Posting Setup , set the COGS (Interim) account to the receivables account that represents stock sent, not invoiced .
- In General Posting Setup , set the Inventory Accrual (Interim) account to the payables account that represents stock received, not invoiced .
Important: Confirm these account mappings with your accountant. They determine how the value of uninvoiced impressed stock appears on your balance sheet.
Receiving Impressed Stock
Impressed stock is received onto a purchase order but deliberately left uninvoiced, so the order stays open until the supplier bills you.
Create a Purchase Order for the supplier in the usual way and add the impressed stock items.
Choose Post, then select Receive only. Do not invoice at this stage.
The order remains open, with the received quantity now showing a Quantity to Invoice. The stock is available to use immediately.
You can receive against the same order as many times as needed throughout the period. Each receipt is recorded as a posted purchase receipt that you will match against the supplier's invoice later.
Invoicing Impressed Stock
When the supplier sends their invoice — typically at the end of the month — you record only the quantities they have actually billed you for, then match those quantities back to the receipts.
Select Purchase Invoices from the Purchasing menu.
Create a New Purchase Invoice, Select the supplier, enter the supplier's invoice number in the Vendor Invoice No. field, and add the impressed stock items with the quantities shown on the supplier's invoice.
Choose Process Impressed Stock under the Home menu. The Impress Stock Processing window opens, showing each invoice line.
For each line, select the posted purchase receipt (or receipts) that the quantity should be invoiced against, then choose Process .
- The system matches the invoiced quantity to the selected receipts and posts them.
- If a line cannot be matched because it was not yet posted as a receipt, you can either delete that line (for example, if the supplier has billed you in error) or investigate why the stock was not received before continuing.
Once the lines are matched, choose Post to post the invoice. The impressed stock process for those received items is now complete.
You can also run the Impressed Stock process directly from a purchase order, Home, then Process Impress Stock. When run from a purchase order it creates a new invoice; when run from a purchase invoice it updates the current document.
Note: Once Delete Inv. POs Enabled is on, the daily job queue automatically deletes any purchase order that is both fully received and fully invoiced. Orders that have been received but not yet fully invoiced remain in the list.
See Also