Materials on jobs
Recording what a job consumed gives you its real cost, the line items to bill, and stock figures you can trust. Materials go on the job as you use them.
Applies to: every plan. The Materials card sits on the job and follows the job permissions. Seeing it needs erp:operations:jobs:view. Adding a line needs erp:operations:jobs:edit or erp:operations:jobs:add-materials, which is the permission to give field staff who record materials but nothing else.
Prerequisites: The Job Detail Page and Products & Services
The Materials card
Open a job and find the Materials card, under the eyebrow Inventory. Each line shows the Item with its SKU, then Qty, Unit Cost, Sell Price, Margin and Total. Total Materials at the foot adds the lines up. With nothing recorded it reads No materials recorded.
Margin is worked out from the two prices: sell price less unit cost, over sell price. A line with no sell price shows an em dash instead.
Add a material
- Select Add Material.
- Inventory Item — optional. Search your catalogue and choose an item, and the description, unit cost and sell price fill themselves in. Skip it for something you bought once and will never stock.
- Description — required, whether or not you picked an item.
- Quantity — how much went on the job.
- Unit Cost (ex GST) — what it cost you.
- Sell Price (ex GST) — what the customer pays. Margin beside it updates as you type and cannot be edited directly.
- Deduct from inventory — see below. It appears only for stock-tracked items.
- Select Add Material.
Both prices exclude GST. GST is added once, on the invoice.
Stock deduction
A stock-tracked item added to a job comes off your stock on hand. The tick box reads Deduct from inventory and shows what is in stock beside it, for example 14 Each in stock. Ask for more than that and a warning tells you where the deduction lands: This will take stock to -3.
Whether the box starts ticked comes from your business default, which is on unless someone has turned it off. Clear it for one line and only that line skips the deduction.
- Products and materials are stock-tracked by default.
- Services are never stock-tracked, so the tick box never appears for them.
- Consumables are physical but untracked unless you opt in on the item.
The job line remembers how much stock it took. Editing the quantity later adjusts stock by the difference, and deleting the line puts back exactly what it took.
Edit or delete a line
Use the pencil to open Edit Material. Change Description, Quantity, Unit Cost or Sell Price, then select Save Changes. When the line has taken stock, the form says how much, so you know what a change will move. The bin deletes the line.
How materials reach the invoice
The Job Summary card lists the billable materials, adds them to labour, applies GST and shows the total. On a time-and-materials job, that summary is what Generate Invoice builds from. Materials are priced there at their sell price. A line left without one falls back to its unit cost plus any markup set on it.
There is no expenses card on the job. Costs that are neither materials nor labour — fuel, parking, plant hire, permits — have nowhere to sit against a job in the portal today. Record them as a material line with a description, or keep them outside AxiomBlue, until a job expenses screen ships.
What you should see
The new line appears on the Materials card with its margin and total, and Total Materials grows by that amount. If the line deducted stock, the item's quantity on hand drops by the quantity you entered.