Ask a dealer how much stock he is holding and he will give you a number. Ask him how much of it is Syngenta's and how much is the local company's, and the answer takes longer — because the register counts products, and the trade runs on companies.

That gap costs money in three specific places.

The payable you cannot see

You take a consignment on credit from four companies in the same fortnight. Each one has its own terms, its own man who comes to collect, and its own memory of what is outstanding. The register records the goods. It does not add up what each company is owed.

So the figure lives in your head until their representative arrives with his own figure, and one of you is wrong. Usually nobody can prove which.

A company-wise payable is not sophisticated accounting. It is the same total the company's man already has, kept on your side of the counter as well.

The line that never sells

Every shop is carrying something a company pushed on it two seasons ago. You know roughly which product it is. What you do not know, because nothing sorts stock that way, is how much of your capital is sitting in one company's slow lines.

Sorted by company, that is one glance. Six lakh in a company whose products move twice a year is a decision — either push them, return what you can, or stop taking that allocation. Unsorted, it is a vague feeling that you are always short of cash.

The scheme you cannot check

Companies run targets and schemes. Hit the volume, get the rate or the credit note. Whether you actually hit it depends on how much of their line you moved this season — a number that exists only if purchases and sales are both tagged with the company.

Without it, you take their word for the calculation. Dealers who track it themselves usually find the argument goes better.

What "company-wise" actually needs to mean

Filing products under a company name is the easy half. The half that matters:

  • Purchases recorded against the company, not just the product, so each consignment adds to that company's running payable and each payment reduces it.
  • The payable visible without adding anything up — one list, every company, what is owed today.
  • Sales tagged too, so you can see what each company's lines earned rather than just what they cost.
  • Profit at the rate you actually paid, per batch. A company whose rate rose twice this season is not the same company it was in March, and averaging hides that.

How AgroPOS does it

Every product carries its company. Purchases are recorded per company against the batch that arrived, so:

  • Each company has a running payable — what you owe right now, updated by every consignment and every payment, with the whole history behind it.
  • Payments settle against the oldest bills first, so a part payment does not leave four bills half-cleared and nobody sure which.
  • Profit by product ranks by what actually earned, costed at the rate each batch was bought at — so a slow line and a thin-margin line are both visible instead of averaged into "stock".
  • The stock register for an Agriculture Department inspection prints per company where the register asks for it.

None of this asks you to work differently. You already buy by company; the software just stops pretending you buy by product.

Where to start

If you are moving off a register, do not try to reconstruct history. Enter each company's current outstanding as a single opening balance, and let the next consignment be the first real entry. Within a season the account tells you what you need, and you never had to type two years of bills.

More on how purchases and supplier accounts work in AgroPOS, or see what it costs.