How to Record a Vendor Purchase
Learn how to log a vendor purchase in Ardent Seller — from opening the Create Purchase sheet and picking the vendor, to adding line items with cost and package quantity, capturing tax and shipping, and attaching a payment method. This tutorial walks through the full flow so every shipment you receive is costed correctly and flows into your recipes and reports.
Transcript
Full narration from the video, broken down by section.
Welcome
That box of supplies just landed on your doorstep — wax, essential oils, glass jars, a bit of shipping on top. Before any of it becomes a candle, it needs to get logged in Ardent Seller so the costs flow into your recipes and your inventory counts stay honest. One quick note before we start — every item you're buying has to already exist in your inventory. If yours doesn't, pause here and add it first. Okay, let me show you how to record a vendor purchase.
Navigate to Purchases
From your dashboard, expand the Source section in the sidebar. This section holds everything you bring into your business — ingredients, packaging, vendors, and right at the bottom, Purchases. Click Purchases. This is the list of every purchase you've recorded, with filters, sorting, and all the same column controls you're used to.
Open the Create Purchase Form
To log a new purchase, click the Add Purchase button in the toolbar. This opens the purchase form as a side panel. Today's date is already filled in for the initiation date, and the status defaults to Initiated. You'll see a reminder that transactions only affect inventory counts when they're marked as Completed — so we'll come back to that. The purchase order number is optional, handy if you want to match it to the vendor's invoice later.
Select the Vendor
Open the Vendor dropdown and pick who you bought from. If the vendor isn't in your list yet, you can click the plus button to the right and create one on the fly. I'll pick Pacific Botanicals — where our essential oils and soy wax came from. We'll leave the status as Initiated for now. You can flip it to Completed once the shipment actually arrives, and that's when your inventory counts will update.
Add Items to the Purchase
Now let's add what we bought. Click Add Item to open a line item. In the Inventory field, start typing the name — I'll search for Soy Wax — and pick it from the results. Notice that Ardent Seller automatically pulls in the Package Unit that's compatible with this ingredient — pound, in this case. The unit dropdown only offers compatible options, like ounces or kilograms for a mass-tracked item, so you can't accidentally mix types. And whatever unit you buy in, Ardent Seller converts it to your tracking unit behind the scenes, so your inventory always reads in the same unit. Enter the cost per pound — three dollars and fifty cents — and the package quantity, fifty pounds. The line total fills in automatically. Let's add one more. Click Add Item again, search for Lavender Essential Oil, set the cost to eight-fifty, and the quantity to sixteen fluid ounces.
Add Tax, Shipping, and a Payment Method
Scroll down to the totals section. The items total comes to three hundred and eleven dollars — fifty pounds of soy wax plus sixteen ounces of lavender oil. Vendor invoices usually tack on a few more charges, so let's add them. I'll enter twenty-four dollars and eighty-eight cents for tax and fifteen dollars for shipping. Finally, open Payment Methods and pick Bank Transfer. The grand total updates to three hundred fifty dollars and eighty-eight cents — exactly what the vendor charged.
Save and Wrap Up
Everything checks out, so click Create Purchase. The sheet closes and the purchase shows up at the top of the list, with the vendor, the total, and an Initiated status. Once the shipment arrives, flip the status to Completed — that's when your soy wax and lavender oil counts update, and the costs get baked into the unit price used by your recipes. That's it. A couple minutes of clean data entry now saves you hours of guessing at tax time and keeps every batch you make honestly costed. If this helped, hit like and subscribe for more Ardent Seller tutorials. Thanks for watching, and happy making.