What a pallet of panels really costs your margins

Most installers doing 15 or more jobs a month buy materials in bulk. A pallet of panels, a reel of cable, a case of inverters. The unit price is better, the van doesn't wait on a supplier, and the crew always has what it needs.

Then the accounting catches up with you. That pallet was ordered against whichever project happened to trigger it, so one job swallows the whole delivery cost and looks like a disaster, while the next six jobs draw from the same pallet and look artificially brilliant. Your per-job margin reports turn into noise. And the only record of what's actually sitting in the warehouse or the van bay is a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember.

Stock Locations fix this, and as of this month they're live on every Payaca account. No pilot flag, no opt-in. If you're an admin, the Stock section is in your sidebar now.

Book a demo to see stock control working alongside your quoting and job management.

What a Stock Location is

A Stock Location is a named place where your business holds materials between the supplier and a project. "Bristol warehouse". "Unit 3". "Blue van". You buy stock into it with Purchase Orders, you see what's on hand and what it's worth, and you move materials onto projects when a job actually needs them.

The important part is where the cost sits. When you confirm a purchase order against a Location, the cost stays at that Location. It only lands on a project when you issue the stock, and it lands at the real cost of what you're holding, not the price of the most recent order.

The number that makes it work: weighted average cost

Every Location values its stock at weighted average cost (WAC). Each new delivery blends into what you already hold rather than replacing it.

Worked through with real numbers:

• You buy 30 panels at £95 each into the warehouse. That's £2,850 of stock on hand, at £95 a panel.
• Prices move. A month later you buy 20 more of the same panel at £110, adding £2,200.
• You now hold 50 panels that cost you £5,050 in total, so the WAC is £101 per panel.

When a job needs 12 panels, you move them from the warehouse onto the project and £1,212 lands on that job's actual material cost. The remaining 38 panels stay on hand at £3,838. No project ate the pallet, and no project got free panels. Every job carries the honest cost of the material it used.

That's what makes per-job margin reporting believable again. If you've ever had an ops meeting derailed by "why did this job lose money" when the real answer was "it paid for everyone else's cable", this is the fix.

Setting it up

The whole flow runs through screens your team already uses.

1. Create your Locations. In the sidebar, open Stock, then Stock locations, and create one per real place you hold materials. Name them after the actual warehouse, unit, or van so the picker is obvious later.
2. Buy stock in. Open a Location, go to its Purchase orders tab, and raise a PO exactly as you would on a project: pick the supplier, add materials and quantities, send it. When the delivery arrives, confirm the PO and the quantity and value appear at the Location.
3. Check what's on hand. The Location's Materials in stock tab shows each material, the quantity held, the WAC per unit, and the total value. The Location's total stock value sits at the top of the page.
4. Issue stock to jobs. On a project's Materials tab, click Order and choose the Location from the picker instead of a supplier. Payaca pre-selects every material the project needs that the Location holds, capped at what's available. Adjust if you want, then move the stock.

A Location only shows up in that picker when it holds something the project actually needs, so the office isn't scrolling past empty warehouses.

Two habits that pay for themselves

Check stock before you re-order. Before raising a supplier PO on a project, look at what your Locations already hold. Moving stock you've already paid for costs nothing and shortens the job. Buying twice because nobody could see the warehouse is exactly the spreadsheet-era problem this replaces.

Keep material names specific. "Solar panel" is useless when you stock three models. Include manufacturer and model in the material name and the stock list stays readable at fifty line items.

Who this is for

If you're a two-person outfit ordering per job, you don't need stock control and nothing about your Payaca account changes. The Stock section is admin-only and sits quietly until you create a Location.

This is built for the installers running material through multiple vans, a warehouse, or several branches, where bulk buying is routine and the gap between "what we bought" and "what jobs consumed" is real money. Generic CRMs don't do this at all, and the field service tools that do usually price it as an enterprise add-on. In Payaca it's part of the same system that runs your quoting, scheduling, and job costing, so the material cost that lands on a job flows straight through to the margin you see on it.

If your stock spreadsheet has become a Monday-morning argument, book a demo and we'll show you the whole flow, from PO to on-hand value to real cost landing on a job.