In order to provide accurate profit reporting (since how much you pay for certain items might change over time) inFlow captures the cost from your product record at the time that you ship out your order. What this means is that if last week you sold Item A and shipped it out, and at that time it cost you $5.00 to buy that item, that’s the number that inFlow will use to calculate your profit. If the cost of that item goes up this week when you buy from your vendor, then subsequent purchases will use the new cost instead. It’s important to know this information as it is a basic part of understanding where inFlow gets your profit and what may have gone wrong..

Keeping in mind what we talked about above, one of the most common things to affect the cost reporting is not putting the cost value into your product record before you complete your sales. In the article about Entering Product Costs we talk about how and where to enter your costing. It’s very important to ensure you’re putting your cost information into the correct field since that’s where inFlow will look in order to provide profit reporting.

Unfortunately, if you didn’t have your cost information in the system at the time of you sale inFlow doesn’t have the necessary information to get you profit numbers. That said, there are two ways to correct this:

1. Re-open and re-complete your orders once you’ve updated your cost information. Certainly this can be cumbersome, depending on how many orders you’ve worked through however re-completing these means that going forward you will always be able to pull the accurate profit info.
2. Alternately you can temporarily turn on the “Use Current Cost” option in the General Settings window to tell inFlow to look to the product record RIGHT NOW instead of using the information from the time of the sale. That can allow you to update your cost information and then quickly pull a profit report without having to re-complete all your sales orders. It isn’t a permanent solution however so once you’ve pulled that report you should turn it back off.

To Turn on Use Current Cost:

1. Go to Main Menu > Settings > General Settings and click the Pricing & Tax tab.
2. Check the “Use Current Cost” option in the centre of the window.
3. Check Save & Close to complete the change.
4. Pull your profit report again.
5. Go back into the General Settings window and uncheck “Use Current Cost” as above.