Project Report "Sum" ability to reflect current stock

[kbembedded]

Currently, "Sum" in project reports reflects distributor costs. It might be better to reflect the current average price rather than the distributor cost. The reason being, distributor costs and average price of parts change constantly. The distributor price should only be a reference (also see issue #404) and not reflect the current value/cost of the assembly since that value/cost is more dependent on the stock on-hand.

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[odingalt]

Average price can be misleading. For example, if you have good price on parts for several years, the average price will be weighted heavily on these past purchases. If suddenly the manufacturer increase their prices on the parts, the average price will not properly reflect market conditions.

Also, for small jobs the unit cost will be much higher (short order), than for large jobs where you meet distributor standard reel quantity.

I can see the usefulness of the distributor cost - some small companies may not keep inventory, but rather they will purchase the inventory specifically for each project. In this case, the estimator will use the project report tool to estimate project costs based on current distributor prices (and not historical average price from long ago).

I can see usefulness for both methods, I would not replace one with the other, but make the feature request to expand the options in project reporting to include both values as options.

[kbembedded]

I see your point. I would love to see this as an additional column option, but not necessary the default.

[DIYsciBorg]

I think the system should make more use of the distributor data from the part. Perhaps show two values? "Average" and "This order"
When doing larger runs, you are less concerned with the fluctuations and really only care about the total average over a long time. So a price spike is still in the noise. In that case, you only care about the average. But on short runs that spike becomes more critical.
Keeping your distributor data up to date, along with multiple quantities to order in bulk, and alternate distributors is a lot of effort... only worth it if the software can help you to make sure it pays off.

[baradhili]

linked to #302