Every product in Retail POS has an average cost. This is a weighted average of the supply prices at which the current units of stock were received. It's used to calculate the cost of goods sold in reporting.

Understanding average cost

Average cost only changes when new stock is added to your inventory, like receiving a purchase order or transfer, or reversing a sale or return. It doesn't change when you edit a product's supply price, make a sale, send a stock transfer, perform a full or partial inventory count, or import inventory using a spreadsheet.

If you have multiple outlets, average cost is tracked separately per outlet. The same product can carry a different average cost at each outlet, based on what was actually paid for stock there.

You can view the average cost of a product on the Inventory movements page or in the Inventory summary report.

New products

When creating a new product, add the supply price when you add the initial inventory. This sets the starting average cost. If possible, add inventory using a purchase order with an accurate supplier price instead of manually adding inventory to new products.

Receiving purchase orders and transfers

When receiving purchase orders, the supply price of the received stock is used to recalculate the average cost.

Manually changing inventory levels on the Catalog page only changes the quantity. It does not update the average cost because no cost is recorded for the added units.

When stock is transferred between outlets, the cost price on the transfer line item is used to recalculate the average cost at the receiving outlet. The average cost won’t change at the sending outlet.

Inventory counts, imports, and adjustments

Inventory counts and stock adjustments change the inventory quantity but don't change the average cost.

Changing the inventory amount in an import won’t update the average cost, only the amount of inventory on hand. To change average cost using a CSV file, follow the instructions in Editing average cost with a CSV import.

Editing average cost with a CSV import

The average cost can be affected by incorrect supply prices when receiving stock orders and transfers. As a result, your reporting may not be accurate. You can change the average cost of products using a CSV import.

Before you start

Editing average cost

1. Navigate to Catalog > Products.
2. (Optional) Use the filters to narrow your product list.
3. Click Export list.
4. Open the downloaded file in a spreadsheet software like Excel or Google Sheets.
5. Create a new column in the spreadsheet called average_cost_outlet_name. Change outlet_name to the name of the outlet you’re updating average cost for. The outlet name must match exactly to the name used in Retail POS or the import will fail.
6. If updating multiple outlets, create a new column for each outlet you’re updating.
7. Enter the average cost for each product in the column as a number with up to four decimal places with no currency symbols. If you do not enter a value for a product, the average cost will not be updated.
8. Save the spreadsheet as a CSV file.
9. In Retail POS, navigate to Catalog > Products.
10. Click Import.
11. Drag and drop your file, or click Choose a file to upload to search for and add the file.
12. Map columns from the file to the relevant Retail POS field. Any fields that aren’t mapped will show an Unmapped flag. Select which column to map to from the Spreadsheet column dropdown.
13. Click Next.
14. Click Import products.

What's next?