We are looking at several Odoo applications that we believe to be useful for a new restaurant or food industry business getting things off the ground. We previously covered using Point of Sale, and will continue on this week with Purchase.
While there are many features included in the Purchase application, we will focus on just a few.
Pricelists
Pricelists allow us, as the buyer, to get the best possible prices for purchases we make frequently. If we sold hamburgers? We would need some buns. Of we sell coffee? If our customers are like me, we're going to be buying sweeteners and creamers. Using vendor pricelists makes it easy to buy the things we need at budget-friendly prices. Another great thing about using pricelists in Odoo is that when we make a purchase from a new vendor, the prices for those items are automatically added and updated for us. If we can be only one thing, we should be efficient. Odoo is here to help!
Blanket Orders/Call for Tenders
In Odoo, we have two pre-configured types of Purchase Agreements: Blanket Orders and Call for Tenders.
A Blanket Order is a contract between us and our vendor used to negotiate a discounted price for our business. This is done by agreeing to have scheduled purchases at predetermined intervals, a set quantity and price for the products, an agreed-upon delivery date.
A Call for Tenders, on the other hand, is a way for us to reach out to several vendors at once to try and find the best price for the product we need. In short, it's like asking for bids. So say, in our example of a small restaurant, we wanted to find out who among our vendors could give us the best price on hamburger buns. We send out "the call," and make a decision based upon the information sent back to us by those vendors and then choose who to buy from. Just another way that Odoo provides to help save us time and money.
Units of Measure
In many cases, products are bought in large packs and then sold as individual units or smaller packs. Using the built-in unit of measure (UoM) function, once products are configured correctly, the system will do the rest. Let's again look at our hamburger buns. We order them in packs of 50, but we'd obviously use them at a one-burger-ordered to one-bun ratio. If we were to set the Purchasing UoM to 50 units, and the individual bun as one unit, the cost is automatically calculated for each bun. This helps us easily track the cost of the products our company sells.
Let's take a look at Purchase in motion!
I'm only scratching the surface here, but fear not! We offer hands-on training to teach you to use the tools that Odoo gives us. You can schedule an appointment and set up a time to explain your unique business needs or ask for a quick demo of Odoo's apps. We also have Purchase documents in our ever-growing library of documentation, where we post Odoo version-specific explanations and workflows of the many components to many Odoo applications. If that still isn't enough, we also offer Courses!