Purchase Report

See what you bought, from whom and at what cost, from the supplier documents that actually post: finalised invoices and returns, line by line or rolled up per item with the closing stock balance. Orders, GRNs and draft invoices never appear. A Purchase Invoice (No Stock In) is read but adds a row of zeros, so a period with those invoices reports less than the payables they created, with no message.

Overview

The Purchase Report applet answers “what did we buy, from whom, at what cost?” from the purchase documents that actually post: finalised Purchase Invoices and Purchase Returns. Accounts-payable staff, buyers and finance managers open it to see purchase lines with their linked GRN and purchase order numbers, or the same data rolled up per item with quantity, cost and closing stock balance, and to export either grid.

It is read-only. Purchase orders, GRNs and draft invoices do not appear in it — a purchase shows up only once its invoice (or return) is FINAL. Purchase Invoices (No Stock In) are read but contribute nothing: every one of their columns computes to zero, for the reason set out under Lifecycle and effects.

Where it fits

Screens and menus

Purchase Report (by document)

Screenshot withdrawn; a recapture from a demo tenant is on the list.

Advanced Search (the shared general search panel; a period is mandatory): keyword (item code, name, description, scan code, alternate codes, remarks — at least three characters), Period (date from / to), Date Type (which header date the period applies to: transaction date by default, created date, updated date or the supplier document’s reference date — there is no finalised date and no due date to choose), Supplier, Salesman (the purchaser recorded on the document), Item Type, Item Status, Item Code, Calculate Base On, Branch and up to twenty item-category groups. There is no company or location filter; to report one location, export and filter the Location column. Each search field can be hidden with its HIDE_SEARCH_* key.

A search typed into the keyword box alone, without running the Advanced Search panel, covers 1 January 2022 to the end of 2099 whatever period the panel shows, so a document dated before 2022 never appears that way. Run the panel with a period when you need older purchases.

Calculate Base On picks which item price or cost is multiplied by quantity to fill Unit Cost / Cost Amt (and Purchase Cost on the item-code report): moving-average cost (cost_ma, the default), replacement cost, reference price 1–3, delta price 1–3, rebate price 1–3, sales minimum / maximum price or purchase minimum / maximum price. Once Application Settings has been saved, the list offers only the bases whose ADVANCED_SEARCH_SHOW_<BASIS> switch is on (the purchase maximum price, for example, needs the switch labelled for it); with none on, the list is empty and the report stays on moving-average cost. There is no permission that adds a basis for one user.

That makes it a price-discipline check as well as a costing one. Switch on the purchase minimum and maximum bases, run the same month twice, and Cost Amt shows what the lines would have cost at each item’s agreed price limits beside Amount Net, what you actually paid. A line paid above the purchase maximum stands out without opening a single invoice.

Columns: Doc No, Date, Doc Type, Doc Reference Date, Ref. No, Company, Branch, Location, Supplier, Item Code, Item Name, Type, Sub Type, UOM, Serial #, Qty, Unit Price, Unit Cost, Cost Amt, Gross Amount, Amount Disc, Amount Net, Amount Tax, Amount Txn, GRN No, PO No, and the five external references (Quotation, Order, Delivery Order, Invoice, Others). Each row is one item on one document (a serialised line keeps its serial numbers together on that row). The report defines no per-document subtotal, only a total footer, so sort or filter on Doc No to read one document. The grid’s status bar exports the current result to Excel/CSV; the column toggle lets each user show or hide columns.

Purchase Report By Item Code

Same search panel, less Salesman, plus Optional, which starts ticked at Hide GL Code Type: GL-code lines are left out of this report until you untick it, while the by-document report always includes them — the usual reason the two reports’ totals differ. Columns: Item Code, Item Name, Type, UOM, Branch, Location, Category 1–20, Qty, Purchase Amount, Purchase Cost (per Calculate Base On), Stock Balance (the location’s balance as at the end of the period). Rows are per item per branch, location and pricing scheme, and also per document currency, exchange rate and the item name typed on the line, so one item bought in ringgit and in US dollars, or renamed on one invoice, appears on more than one row.

Settings

Configuration

Before you can use it

Applet settings

Settings → Default Selection, and its per-user twin under Personalization, save a default branch and location that neither report reads. The search panel opens with no branch or location chosen whatever they say, so choose the branch in the search each time; setting a default changes nothing.

Settings → Application Settings — this applet keeps its own field-configuration screen (tabs By Document, By Item Code, Item Category Group, plus the sidebar toggles) and reads these keys; the shared screen’s generic document toggles do not apply:

Keys declared in the settings model but not used by these screens (custom statuses, the SST and WHT enable flags, dimension include flags, PRINTABLE) have no effect.

Document behaviour settings

Not applicable — the applet creates no documents and has no printable formats; export is the grid’s Excel/CSV export.

Feature visibility / permissions

• Server-side: both reports require the purchase-report permission family (owner, admin, or read targeted to one or more branches). Read access to the purchase documents themselves is not what is checked.
• Client-side permissions checked in code: SHOW_PURCHASE_REPORT_BY_DOCUMENT_MENU, SHOW_PURCHASE_REPORT_BY_ITEM_CODE_MENU, SHOW_MA_COST, SHOW_QUOTATION, SHOW_ORDER, SHOW_DELIVERY_ORDER, SHOW_INVOICE, SHOW_OTHERS. (The SHOW_ADVANCED_SEARCH_<OPTION> cost-base permissions are no longer checked: the shared search panel dropped them in July 2026, so only the settings above decide the list.) None are seeded in the registry for purchaseReport — ask BigLedger to add them to this applet’s permission list before assigning; Settings → Client Side Permission only grants codes already on it.
• Personalization → Sidebar hides menus per user.

Fields

The applet has no create or edit forms. The search fields and the columns of both grids are listed under Screens and menus; the only validations are Please enter both Date From and Date To before searching and Search keyword must more than 2 characters.

Lifecycle and effects

This applet is a report. It creates no document, writes no row and holds no state of its own: both grids are one call each to the tenant’s purchase-report service, and everything you see is computed at the moment you press SEARCH, from the purchase documents as they stand right then. Nothing is snapshotted, so a report run twice over the same period will differ if a document was finalised, voided or edited in between — and re-running it is the correct way to refresh a figure, because there is no cache to clear.

What the service reads, and the four filters that decide whether your document is in it

Every quantity and every amount is scaled by the line’s quantity signum

The report does not sum amount_net; it sums amount_net * quantity_signum, line by line, and the same for gross, discount, tax, transaction amount and each of the fifteen cost bases. The signum is the value the document type’s data-consistency object stamps onto every line it writes:

Where the cost columns come from, which is not where people expect

Unit Cost / Cost Amt and Purchase Cost are not looked up from the item master when you run the report. They are read from the price and cost columns stored on the document line when the document was written — cost_ma_price_company, cost_replacement_price_company, ref_price1..3, delta_price1..3, rebate_price1..3 and the four sales/purchase min-max prices — multiplied by quantity and by the signum. Calculate Base On only chooses which of those stored columns is read.

Two consequences worth knowing before you argue with the number: a cost base the line never captured reports as zero, not as an error; and changing an item’s moving-average cost today does not change what last month’s report says, because last month’s lines still carry last month’s figure. That is usually what you want, and it is the opposite of how most people assume a report works.

Foreign-currency documents are shown in company currency

For a document whose currency differs from the company’s, the browser divides every amount on the row by the document’s exchange rate before showing it, so Amount Net, Amount Txn and the rest read in company currency, not in the supplier’s currency. A USD 1,000 invoice at a rate of 4.40 shows as about RM 4,400. To see an invoice in its own currency, open the invoice itself.

The cost figure (Unit Cost, Cost Amt, Purchase Cost) goes through the same division. The stored cost columns it is built from are company-cost columns, and whether they are held in company currency on a foreign-currency line has not been settled, so before relying on cost for imported purchases, compare one foreign-currency line’s Unit Cost with the item’s moving-average cost in stock. If they differ by roughly the exchange rate, read cost for those documents from the stock side instead.

Where Stock Balance comes from

The Stock Balance column is not a sum of movements and not today’s balance. It is the bal_qty carried on the most recent inventory transaction line for that item and location dated before the day after your period end — the running balance the inventory ledger had already stored on that movement row. An item with no movement before that date shows an empty balance rather than zero, and the figure is per location, so an item held in two locations appears twice with two balances.

What it does not do

No journal, no stock movement, no document, no e-Invoice, no job processor, no scheduled refresh. Nothing in this applet writes to the tenant database at all. The two SHOW_… client-side permissions it checks are not seeded in the registry (0 definitions for purchaseReport, queried 2026-09-19), so BigLedger has to add them to the applet’s permission list before they can be granted.

Related applets

• Purchase Invoice (Internal), Purchase Invoice No Stock In (Internal), Purchase Return (Internal) — the documents reported.
• Purchase GRN (Internal), Purchase Order (Internal) — sources of the GRN No and PO No columns.
• Payment Voucher (Internal), Purchase Debit Note (Internal) — settlement documents the same backend service reports against invoices.
• Creditor Report — supplier balances; Stock Balance — the balance the Stock Balance column is taken from.
• Supplier, Organisation, Doc Item Maintenance, Inventory Item Maintenance — master data behind the filters and columns.

Troubleshooting

Related documentation

• Purchasing module and its related applets
• Standard procurement workflow