Tracking Landed Costs

How To
1

How is everyone else handling landed costs in Striven? When importing products from overseas, there’s the cost of the product, ocean freight, drayage costs, import duties/ tariffs and other charges. This affects the inventory value.

Is there a way to see at a glance what my cost was for a particular shipment for a product? Do I need to do some complicated work arounds?

thanks everyone

2

I am still waiting for Striven to accept this feature request. It saddens me.

3

So much lost potential.

1 Like
4

Greetings James!

Thank you for your inquiry!

At this time, Striven does not currently offer a built-in way to track Landed Costs. However, I’d be happy to connect with you further to explore how we might address your needs using the features available today.

I’ll follow up with you soon to learn more about your specific processes, so I can either help find a workable solution or submit your request as a potential enhancement to our team.

Thank you for contributing to our Community Forms—your post helps foster shared learning and growth for everyone.

At your service,

Ashley

5

It’s really difficult to be accurate with landed cost. The systems that I’ve researched either require you to set a standard shipping cost per item (you make an educated guess) or it allocates the shipping cost for items based on the percentage of the total cost or weight of the shipment (they make an educated guess).

In our industries, we are placing three types of orders.

  • Custom one off order for a specific client where there is a big ticket item and ancillary products on one shipment. For these, we allocate the shipping cost to the appropriate shipping cost account, based on the division of the order.
  • Stocking orders of case/pallet quantities of good that we sell by the square foot or piece. For these the shipping cost is also allocated to the appropriate account by division, but the items themselves have an “Freight Required” tag so we are charging around 10% more than our last averages. If we notice a ticket that doesn’t fit the formula, we make adjustments throughout the year. **People don’t like seeing freight on bills. Amazon and the internet sellers have given the masses the impression that it just doesn’t exist or cost that much. When we see someone get fuzzed up about it, we explain that we don’t want them to be charged sales tax on freight charges built into the cost of the goods. It’s a waste of money. Normally they calm down. For those in jurisdictions that charge sales tax on freight, that won’t work, obviously.”
  • Restock orders of mixed equipment and accessories. This is tougher. We usually divide the freight cost between divisions by cost or weight, but it’s an educated guess.

With this setup, we can track the landed cost by creating P&Ls by division with only Product Income, Freight Income, Cost of Goods Sold:Product and Cost or Goods Sold:Frieght. It allows us to get a landed cost by division and calculate markup and margin.

We are getting ready to implement performance bonuses based on KPIs, which is really tough for Striven to handle right now. I have faith that the upcoming sales order revamp will be field service focused so a better way is implemented. There’s no good way to tie labor time to an agreement unless you bill by the hour, and billing by the hour isn’t good anyone except lawyers and the public sector. Homeowners don’t want to think if the guys slow roll their job, they’ll end up with a hefty bill at the end they weren’t expecting. Employees want to be rewarded for being knowledgeable and efficient. Owners want a fair way to charge customers for an ‘average’ technician, while being able to reward those that are better than average.

Right now, shipping costs and sales won’t enter into our KPIs, as there is no way to track them by job. All we can do is look at the monthly P&L and make adjustments as needed per division (and vendor). Instead, we’re just trying to find a way to link labor time (and costs) to an individual job, so we can have a way to track efficiencies of technicians and teams.