Why can't I select current inventory when assigning costs to a sale?

As we've outlined in other articles, Seller Ledger makes it possible to record the cost of an item after it has sold. Just go to Inventory -> Sold and click the "Add Costs" button next to the sale.

Now, there is a case where, even if you have items in stock in your inventory, you may not be able to choose from them when adding costs to a sale. You might see a dialog box that looks like this:

Searching for inventory doesn't show any items. How can this be?

The answer is in the date you may have used when recording inventory purchases. By default, Seller Ledger assumes that you sell items AFTER they are purchased. So, if you have imported, let's say, 90 days of sales history from one or more online marketplaces, and you then add a bunch of inventory using a more current date, those purchased items will not show up when you try to tie them to an older sale.

That said, you have a couple of options on how to proceed:

1. You can change the date of your inventory purchase to be prior to the sales you're trying to add costs for.
2. You can change a setting we've exposed under Settings -> Business

Click the pencil/edit icon to the right of the "Orders to Purchase Date Matching" option and enter how far back you'd like Seller Ledger to match inventory purchases to sales.

Note: we originally introduced this setting to better support drop-shippers and folks who order inventory after sales have been made. If you are just starting out and trying to map costs based on inventory you've had for a while, we recommend using option 1 and changing your date of purchase in the system.