Additional costs & discounts

A purchase order rarely consists of line items alone — freight surcharges, handling fees, early-payment discounts, and one-off rebates all change what you actually owe. Logistified lets you record any number of these entries per PO, each with its own reason, either as a fixed amount or as a percentage of the order’s item subtotal. A fixed entry can be entered in a currency other than the order’s own — customs, brokerage, and final-mile delivery are often invoiced separately from the supplier, in the local currency — and any entry, fixed or percentage, can carry its own purchase tax.

Adding a cost or discount

On the PO detail page, the Order Information card’s financial breakdown lists each entry with its reason and amount. Click Manage costs & discounts (or Add cost / discount when the order has none yet) to open the editor. For each entry you set:

Calculation — Fixed amount or Percentage.
Amount (fixed entries) or Percentage (%) — positive values add costs, negative values apply discounts. A -10 fixed entry or a -2.5 percentage entry reduces the order total.
Cost currency (fixed entries only) — defaults to the order’s own currency; pick a different one to record the cost as it was actually invoiced. See Entering a cost in another currency.
VAT / purchase tax — an optional purchase tax rate for this entry, or No tax (the default for new costs; see Tax on a cost or discount for discounts).
Reason — free text such as “Freight surcharge” or “Customs and delivery”. The reason appears next to the amount in the financial breakdown, on the PO PDF, and as the description of this entry’s line on a pushed accounting bill.

You can add, edit, and remove entries from the same dialog for as long as the order is open, and every change immediately updates the order’s totals. Once the order reaches Completed or Cancelled the breakdown becomes read-only: the Manage costs & discounts button no longer appears and the warning badges described below stop being clickable. The Manage button inside the PO edit dialog locks earlier still — it’s also disabled while the order is On Hold or Disputed, even though the card’s own editor still works there.

The PO edit dialog shows the combined total as a read-only field with its own Manage button. Clicking it saves any unsaved changes in the edit dialog first, then opens the cost editor.

Fixed amount vs. percentage

Fixed amount — a signed amount, in the order’s own currency by default or in any other currency you pick. Use it for flat fees, freight, customs charges, and negotiated rebates.
Percentage — a signed percentage of the order’s item subtotal (line items only, before shipping and tax), always calculated and stored in the order’s own currency. While you type, the dialog previews the resulting amount against the current subtotal. When you save, that amount is stored with the entry.

Entering a cost in another currency

Fixed entries don’t have to be entered in the order’s own currency. This is useful for costs a different party invoices separately from the supplier — customs, brokerage, or final-mile delivery often arrive in the local currency rather than the supplier’s.

Pick a currency from the searchable Cost currency picker. Once it differs from the order’s currency, an Exchange rate field appears, labeled “1 [source currency] = X [order currency]”. Logistified looks up a live reference rate (European Central Bank reference data) and fills it into the empty field automatically, showing the reference date once one loads. Not every currency has a live reference rate — when none loads, the dialog asks you to enter the agreed rate manually. You can always type over the fetched rate to use the rate you were actually charged; the dialog previews the converted amount as you type. The rate you save (stored to six decimal places) stays attached to the entry — Logistified doesn’t re-fetch or adjust it later.

The PO-currency totals, PDF and exports show the saved entry in the order’s own currency. A supplier-billed entry also appears in that currency on the accounting bill. The original amount, currency, and rate stay attached to the entry and are shown alongside the converted amount — on the PO PDF, for example, as “(NZD 115.00 × 0.610000)” next to the reason — so the conversion is always traceable back to what you actually paid.

Percentage entries always stay in the order’s own currency and can’t carry a source currency or exchange rate — for them the editor shows a disabled Snapshot currency field instead.

Tax on a cost or discount

Each entry — fixed or percentage — can carry its own purchase tax, independent of the order’s own header tax rate. Pick a rate from VAT / purchase tax, or leave it as No tax. Only rates of type Purchase, configured at Settings → Tax Rates, are offered.

No tax is the default for new costs (positive entries). A new discount (a negative entry) instead defaults to the order’s own header tax rate, as long as every line item currently counted in the order is taxable — a discount is usually a reduction of the same tax you’re already being charged, so leaving it untaxed can overstate the VAT and total you owe. If the order mixes taxable and tax-exempt lines, or has no header tax rate, new discounts still default to No tax and you choose explicitly. Either way, this only affects a new entry’s starting value — picking a rate yourself, or opening an existing entry, always keeps what’s actually selected.

Tax is calculated on top of the entry’s amount — the amount field is always tax-exclusive — and the dialog previews the resulting tax as you type. For a foreign-currency entry, the tax is calculated on the converted amount in the order’s currency. A discount (a negative entry) carries negative tax, which reduces the order’s combined additional-cost tax; leaving a discount as No tax deliberately leaves that tax unchanged instead.

The rate is snapshotted onto the entry when you save it. If the rate is later renamed, removed, or its percentage changed in Settings, the entry keeps the rate it was actually taxed at — when you edit the entry, the picker shows that saved rate labeled ”· saved snapshot” in place of the live one, and simply re-saving keeps it. Re-selecting the same rate keeps the snapshot too. To move an entry onto a rate’s new percentage, set it to No tax, save, then re-open the entry and pick the rate again.

Entries with tax show a rate badge in the financial breakdown — the rate’s saved name plus its percentage, for example “GST 15%” — along with their tax amount. The sum of every entry’s tax appears as its own Additional cost tax line in the order’s financial breakdown and totals whenever the combined tax is non-zero, alongside the combined additional cost / discount amount; the PO list shows it as “(incl. … additional cost tax)” under the grand total.

Keeping percentage entries up to date

A percentage entry is calculated when you save it. If the order’s items change afterwards — lines added or removed, quantities confirmed at different numbers, or goods received, rejected, or cancelled in different numbers — the stored amount no longer matches the percentage. (The subtotal follows the same received → confirmed → ordered basis the rest of the order does, so receiving is the most common reason an entry goes out of date.) Logistified flags such entries with an outdated badge in the financial breakdown; hover it to see what the current value would be, and click it to jump into the editor. Inside the editor, the refresh action (or simply re-saving the entry) recalculates it against the current subtotal.

How charges are spread across units

Landed cost per unit is the unit cost plus the line’s share of shipping, additional costs and discounts, payment tax and tariffs, and (when enabled) purchase tax. Those charges are spread over the units the order is expected to deliver: the confirmed quantity, or the ordered quantity while nothing is confirmed, minus any cancelled or rejected units, and never fewer than the units already received.

Receiving part of an order does not change the per-unit share. With 10 units ordered, 2 received and 100 in shipping, each unit carries 10 — not 50.
A landed cost is shown from Draft on, as a projection, so margins on the Landed basis mean something before the first delivery.
Once the order is Completed or Cancelled, nothing more arrives, so the same charges are spread over the units that actually arrived. Closing an order short therefore concentrates the charges on the received units. The completion dialog tells you how many units are still outstanding; if you already ran Update unit cost after an earlier delivery, run it again after completing so Shopify carries the final value. The Update Unit Costs Now button inside the completion dialog already previews on that final basis.
The Landed total under the line items is the goods expected plus every included charge. While fewer units have arrived than carry the charges, a second line shows the landed value received so far.
Purchase tax on a short-closed order is capitalised on the received goods only.

Running Update unit cost again never double counts: each run recomputes the order’s valuation from the originally recorded cost and stock, so the newest run replaces the previous one.

Where the total shows up

The sum of all entries’ amounts, and separately the sum of their tax, feed the same places the single additional-cost value always did:

The Grand Total on the PO detail page and in the financial breakdown, plus an Additional cost tax line whenever the combined tax is non-zero. The Grand Total label switches to “Grand Total (incl. tax)” whenever the order carries a header tax rate or a non-zero combined additional-cost tax, and a line beneath it spells out the total tax included. On a foreign-currency order, the Grand Total and Total Due show your shop currency first with the order’s own-currency figure underneath as “PO currency total” / “PO currency due”; if any entry was invoiced in your shop currency, a “Local costs kept in [shop currency]” note appears too.
The PO PDF totals (when “Show additional costs/discounts” is enabled in PDF preferences and the export template’s Hide unit cost option is off) — each entry prints its own line with its reason, converted amount, and source-currency detail when it differs from the order’s currency, plus a tax line labeled with the rate’s name for each entry that carries tax.
Exports — the purchase-order-level export includes the combined additional cost / discount column, and a separate Additional Cost Tax column is available. It isn’t in the default column set — add it to a purchase-order-level export template first (Settings → Purchase Orders → Export). Note that the export’s total-cost column excludes tax, header and additional-cost tax alike.
Reporting — the purchase-order-level report offers the combined figure as an Adjustments column. Note that Reporting’s Total cost column does include tax — header and additional-cost tax alike — unlike the export column of the same name described above.
Supplier credit limits — credits can be applied up to the supplier invoice amount, including supplier-billed entries and their tax. Separately billed entries are excluded.
Accounting — a connected accounting system receives one bill line per supplier-billed entry with a non-zero amount (using the entry’s reason as the description, or “Additional cost” / “Discount” when the reason is blank), each mapped to its own tax when one’s configured. If an entry’s tax rate can’t be matched to a rate in your accounting system, the push is blocked until you map it — see Accounting sync.

Costs billed separately

For a positive additional cost, select Separately billed — landed cost only when another company invoices you for it, such as a local insurer or freight broker. The cost stays in the PO’s total cost and landed-cost calculation. Supplier payable excludes it, as do credits applied to the PO supplier and the supplier Bill exported to accounting.

Existing entries remain billed by the PO supplier unless you change this selection. Discounts cannot be billed separately. This option does not create another bill in Xero; record that invoice separately in your accounting system.

Once accounting or settlement activity exists, changes that would alter this split may be blocked. Review the linked bill, payments or applied credits before changing the financial records. Duplicating or splitting a PO still copies its cost entries; review those copied charges so the same external invoice is not counted twice.

Order-level vs. line discounts

Everything on this page adjusts the order as a whole — a freight surcharge, an early-payment discount, a rebate on the invoice. To take money off one product instead, put the discount on the line itself: select the lines and apply a percentage or an amount per unit, and the line’s net cost flows into the subtotal that these order-level entries are then calculated against. See Line items & costs → Line discounts.

Note that a percentage entry here is measured against the item subtotal, so applying a line discount is one of the changes that leaves a saved percentage entry showing its outdated badge until you re-save it.