Freight¶
What it costs to get the goods here, as a percentage of what the goods cost.
Where: menu → Inventory → Margins → the truck icon.
Why it is a rate and not part of the cost¶
A delivery fee is a fact about a supplier and a day. It is not an attribute of a tomato.
Spreading $8.50 of freight across eleven lines of a delivery would make every one of those eleven costs a guess -- and the guess then sits inside your average cost for as long as that stock is on the shelf, quietly moving every margin that reads it. So freight never touches what your stock is worth.
What you actually need to know is "am I charging enough to cover getting it here", and that is a rate: freight over goods, across your recent deliveries. You will see it on the Margins screen under each cost:
+3.1% freight = $1.46 landed (estimate for pricing, not in stock value)
An estimate, because it is a shop-wide average applied to one line. It is a good number to price with and a bad number to put in your books, which is exactly why it appears on the pricing screen and nowhere else.
What is on this screen¶
| The headline | Freight as a percentage of goods, over the last 90 days |
| From n of m deliveries | How many deliveries actually recorded a freight figure. Shown when some did not. |
| The trend | The last 30 days against the 30 before |
| By supplier | Each supplier's own rate, dearest first |
| The dockets behind it | Every delivery in the 90 days that recorded freight |
The one rule worth knowing¶
A delivery that said nothing about freight is not a delivery that was free.
Leave the Freight field blank and that delivery is left out of the rate altogether -- both its freight and its goods. Type 0 and it counts as a free delivery and pulls the rate down.
That difference is why the headline says how many of your deliveries the rate is built from. A rate worked out from two deliveries out of forty is a rate worked out from two deliveries, and you should know that before you price a menu with it.
Getting a rate at all¶
Type what the docket charged into Freight when you save a delivery. That is the whole of it -- the rate builds itself from there.
A freight-only docket works. A pallet fee or a fuel levy invoiced on its own, with no goods on it, can be saved as a delivery with no lines. It posts no stock and joins the rate on the freight side, which is right: it really does make everything else dearer to have here.
When a delivery is out of line¶
After you save one, the summary says so if this delivery's freight is well away from what that supplier usually charges:
Freight on this delivery is 9.4% of the goods. Your supplier's name usually charges 3.1%.
"Well away" is the same tolerance that flags a price move, under Setup → Deliveries. It is a note, not a problem -- one small order from a supplier who charges a flat delivery fee will do it -- but it is worth a look when you were not expecting it.