How Cost to the Business updates
In Ply, an item's Cost to the Business is meant to update with your most recent purchase, whether that purchase comes through a Purchase Order (PO) or an RFQ.
For the update to happen, the order has to be both received and reconciled. Once it is, Ply pushes the latest purchase price into the Cost to the Business for the materials on that order.
If you've reconciled an order and the Cost to the Business still isn't updating, there are two common reasons why.
Reason 1: "Lock business cost from PO reconciliation" is turned on
Head to Settings > Procurement > Purchasing Settings and look for a toggle called "Lock business cost from PO reconciliation."
When this toggle is enabled, reconciling a Purchase Order will no longer overwrite the item's business cost in the catalog. From that point on, business costs can only be changed manually.
So if your costs aren't updating automatically after an order has been received and reconciled, this is the first thing to check. If the toggle is on, that's very likely your answer.
Reason 2: Landed Costs and Cost Layers are both on - and you're reconciling to a job
If you have Landed Costs and Cost Layers enabled at the same time, that combination can stop your costs from updating in certain cases. To understand why, it helps to know what each feature actually does.
Landed Costs was built to add extra costs to your materials (shipping, customs/duties, insurance, and so on) and prorate them into the material's cost.
Those extra costs get folded into the unit cost, so the material's cost reflects what it actually took to get the item in the door.
Cost Layers is designed to track cost at the inventory level. That means your stock's Cost to the Business is broken down by the price you actually paid for each batch. If you have 50 units in stock but bought them at different prices, Cost Layers keeps those separated.
Layers are created automatically whenever you reconcile a PO or RFQ into stock, or you can add one manually from the material itself. You can also choose whether to show a material's Cost to the Business as an average or as the last purchase price, either globally or per item.
When they work together
These two features can coexist without any issues, as long as your orders are reconciled into a stock location = a warehouse or a truck. In other words, into your inventory. When you reconcile into stock, your cost is prorated automatically through Landed Costs, and Cost Layers adds a new layer for each purchase.
When they don't
Here's the catch: if you're using Landed Costs and Cost Layers together and you reconcile to a job, your Cost to the Business will not update.
That's because reconciling to a job means those items never enter your stock. They go straight to the job, which effectively means they were sold. The costs will still reflect correctly on the job itself, but they won't update the cost in your catalog.
Workaround
If you need to reconcile to a job and still have your catalog costs update, you have two options:
Turn Cost Layers off and leave only Landed Costs on.
Or, keep both features on and reconcile into a stock location first (a warehouse or a truck), then send the items from that location to the job. That way the items pass through your inventory, so your costs update, and they still end up on the job.
Both of these are temporary workarounds while our engineering team builds a proper fix for this (a new toggle to handle it).
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