We use Inventory and Purchasing.  We would recommend the products.  We use them in conjunction with Job Cost, Accounts Payable, and General Ledger and it works well.  Particularly, Job Cost can provide you with information of what items were used on each Job and what they cost.  You have a choice of valuation methods in inventory.  With Purchasing, you can purchase items for a particular job and send those items directly to the job when they are received, or you can purchase the items for your warehouse and issue the items from the warehouse to the different jobs. Purchasing creates purchase orders, receipts, and invoices.  The receipts update Inventory.  The invoices are sent to Accounts Payable.  Purchasing also allows you set up price lists from your vendors so that items are ordered at a price which was given to you by your vendor. 

One of the adjustments we have made over the years, is to include the Unit of Measure (UOM) in the description of the items we set up. 

For example, we decided to track a bucket of liquid by the gallon.  We may purchase it by the bucket but use it by the gallon.  So we set up our item's description to be, for example:  Paint (bkt=5gal).  It keeps everyone on the same page when purchasing the item or issuing the item to a job. 

Another example might be if we decided to track plywood by the square foot.  We purchase it by the sheet, but use it by the square foot.  So we set up our item's description to be, for example:  Plywood (sht=32sqft).

Another tip:  Once you have your items set up, and before you set any quantities or amounts, make a copy of the POIV folder.  The copy might be useful should you decide you're not happy with your setup and want to start over.  It may help you from having to start over from scratch. 

Hello Rhonda,

I appreciate your detailed feedback. We currently do have the Purchasing module in place and adding the Inventory module would make things much better for us. One question: Did you guys use any other Inventory/Warehouse Management System before Sage's? We need to import our current inventory database into Sage but we have not found the correct way to do it yet. Do you have any experience on that?

Thanks,

Siavash

We did not have another system.  There isn't a tool to import inventory inside the inventory module.  However, that doesn't mean it's not possible.  Hopefully, someone more knowledgeable than me can answer.