The big picture
A voucher takes money sitting in an expense and puts it on the goods.
You buy 100 kg at ₹120 and pay ₹2,000 to get it to the plant. The stock did not cost ₹120 a kilo — it cost ₹140. Until that ₹2,000 is moved onto the goods, every margin you look at is wrong by 16.7 %, and the stock on your balance sheet is understated by ₹2,000.
A Landed Cost Voucher (LCV) is the document that moves it. It names the goods receipts the charge belongs to, the charges themselves, and how to split them. Applying it raises costPrice on those items and posts the journal.
Where the screens live
Landed Cost
Every voucher; drafts waiting to apply.
/purchases/landed-costsLanded cost by receipt
Which receipts have had their freight landed — and which have not.
/reports/landed-costBill charges
Freight on the supplier's own bill, auto-drafted.
Vendor bill → ChargesThe default
"Capitalise supplier freight" — a default, not a rule.
Settings → PurchasesPermissions: canViewPurchases to see, canManagePurchases to draft, apply and cancel. Apply and Cancel are re-checked on the server, and both refuse if the voucher's date falls in a closed period.
Three ways in
Same voucher, three starting points. Learn which one your situation is.
| Situation | Start from | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| A. The supplier charged freight on the goods bill | Vendor bill → Charges card | Add the charge with "Part of the cost of the goods" ticked; a draft voucher is opened or refreshed automatically when you save the bill. |
| B. A carrier's or clearing agent's bill / expense | That bill or expense → ⋯ → Allocate to goods receipt | Pick the PO and receipts, set the amount and basis, create the draft. |
| C. You know the freight is coming but nothing has been billed | Landed Cost → New Landed Cost Voucher | Type it as an accrual; applying credits Landed Cost Accrual, and the carrier's bill clears that account when it arrives. |
Saving a bill with a capitalised charge only says "Landed cost voucher drafted. Review and apply it to move the charge onto the goods." — or, if the goods have not arrived yet, "Landed cost voucher drafted — waiting for a goods receipt." Nothing has moved onto the goods yet. The draft is waiting for you.
Attaching receipts
A charge lands on goods that have actually been received.
Add receipt → choose the purchase order → tick which receipts of it this charge covers. Only orders that are partially or fully received are offered — you cannot land a cost on goods that have not arrived. Repeat for a shipment that spans several orders.
"This voucher was created from a bill that arrived before the goods; attach the receipt when it is taken, then apply." Perfectly normal for door A — the freight invoice often beats the lorry. Leave the draft; attach the receipt when the GRN is done.
Set the voucher date here too. It decides the accounting period the journal lands in, and applying is refused if that period is closed.
Charges
Tax-exclusive. Always. This is the single most common mistake.
The card says it: "Tax-exclusive. Input GST on a freight bill is a credit, not a cost of the goods." The GST you paid the transporter comes back to you as input credit — it is not part of what the goods cost. Type the taxable value, not the invoice total. The Allocate dialog prefills from the document's taxable value for exactly this reason; overwriting it with the bill total is the error to watch for.
Add charge takes a kind — Freight, Customs duty, Clearing, Insurance, Handling, Other — a description ("Ocean freight, CHA clearing…") and the amount. A zero amount saves nothing.
A charge typed by hand has no document behind it yet, and the dialog says what that means: "applying the voucher credits Landed Cost Accrual. Book the carrier's bill to that account when it arrives, and the accrual clears."
Allocation
How the money is split across the lines — and it must add up exactly.
| Basis | Right for |
|---|---|
| By value (default) | Duty and insurance, which scale with what the goods are worth. |
| By quantity | A carrier who charges per piece. |
| By weight | Ordinary freight — but every line's item must have a weight on its master, or it refuses by name. |
| Manual | When you know the split. Each line becomes an editable box, seeded from the last pro-rata answer. |
The footer keeps score live: "Allocated in full", or "₹X still to allocate" / "₹X over-allocated". Each line shows its share, the per-unit uplift and the percentage — +₹20.00/u · 16.7 %.
| It refuses | Fix |
|---|---|
| "Cannot allocate by weight: "…" has no weight on its item master. Set a weight, or allocate by value or quantity." | Put a weight on the item, or change basis. |
| "Manual allocation: "…" has no amount. Enter a share for every line (0 is a valid share)." | Every line needs a number — zero counts. |
| "Manual allocation must add up to the charges: … short|over." | It must balance to within half a paisa. |
| "Add at least one receipt line before allocating." | Attach a receipt (§02). |
Applying
Saving changes nothing. Apply is the button that moves money.
This is the single most likely operational failure in the module: drafts sitting in "Waiting to apply" while everyone assumes the freight has been costed. It has not. Open the voucher and press Apply. Treat that stat card as a to-do list.
The confirmation spells out what will happen: unit costs change immediately, a journal is posted, and the share belonging to units already sold is charged to Cost of Goods Sold. How much of each is decided server-side from the live stock at that moment.
Only units still on hand can be capitalised. Anything already sold has its share charged to COGS today. Apply the day the freight bill arrives and most of it lands on stock; apply three months later and most of it hits P&L in a month that has nothing to do with the purchase.
Apply is disabled with the reason shown beside it — "Waiting for a goods receipt — attach one before applying.", "Add at least one charge.", "Allocation is ₹X short of the charges.", "Only a draft voucher can be applied."
If the supplier's freight already sat in Inventory Asset and all the goods are still on hand, nothing needs to move between accounts. The detail then reads "None — the money never left the account it was in". Not a bug.
Refusals worth recognising
- "… is already landed on stock by voucher LCV/…. Raise a negative voucher instead of applying this one." — the same bill or expense cannot be landed twice.
- "Allocation is out of date on "…": … Reopen the voucher to refresh it." — quantities changed after the draft was written. Open the form (it re-resolves the receipts live) and save.
- "A voucher can cover at most 200 receipt lines." — split it.
Getting it wrong
Cancel while nothing has moved; otherwise, a negative voucher.
Cancel on an applied voucher restores the unit costs and reverses the journal. It is only possible while nothing has moved since it was applied: "… has moved since this voucher was applied, so its cost can no longer be put back. Raise a negative landed cost voucher for the same charges instead."
A voucher can never be deleted — not a draft, not a cancelled one. The trail is the point.
Blocked, and it tells you which voucher: "Landed cost voucher LCV/… has already landed this bill on stock. Cancel it, or raise a negative voucher, before changing the bill's charges." Cancelling the bill itself is blocked the same way. Cancel the voucher first.
Remove a capitalised charge from a bill and its auto-draft is emptied rather than deleted — charges and lines cleared, with the reason written into Notes. You will see ₹0 drafts in the list. That is deliberate; leave them.
The report
Reports → Landed cost by receipt.
Each received line with the supplier cost beside the landed cost and the uplift percentage. Filter by supplier and period, search by item, PO, supplier or voucher, and export CSV.
It deliberately lists receipts that have had no landed cost too — that is how you find the freight nobody costed. The Landed only toggle narrows it when you want the other view. Item pages also carry a Landed badge on stock valuation.
Limits & what is not here yet
Known and deliberate — say them out loud to your accountant.
- No cost layers.
costPriceis one moving average, and "units of this receipt still on hand" is approximated from the item's live stock. Two receipts of the same item at different freight rates give a total that is right and a per-receipt figure that is approximate. - No backward restatement. Applying changes cost from now on and charges the already-sold share to COGS today. Invoices already raised are not reopened.
- Cancel is narrow — only while nothing has moved. Otherwise, a negative voucher (§06).
- Outbound freight is not here. What you pay to send goods out belongs to the dispatch module, not this one.
Still to come: the import bill — Bill of Entry fields, customs duty raised automatically from it, IGST-on-import routed to input credit and the GSTR-3B row, and the supplier's country on the bill. The "Capitalise ineligible GST" setting exists but does nothing yet.
Settings → Purchases → "Capitalise supplier freight" only sets the default state of the tick on a new charge. You can always change it per charge. And a bill with no stock-tracked lines capitalises nothing regardless — there are no goods to land it on.
Quick reference
The page to keep open while your team learns it.
| Concept | Where / what |
|---|---|
| Routes | /purchases/landed-costs · /reports/landed-cost |
| Three doors | Bill charge (auto) · Allocate to goods receipt · New voucher (accrual) |
| Amounts | Always tax-exclusive. Input GST is a credit, not a cost |
| Bases | value (default) · qty · weight (needs item weights) · manual |
| Must balance | Allocated = charges, to within half a paisa |
| Statuses | draft → applied, and applied → cancelled. Never deletable |
| Saving ≠ applying | Only Apply revalues stock and posts the journal |
| Already-sold share | Goes to COGS at apply time — so apply promptly |
| Correcting | Cancel while nothing has moved; otherwise a negative voucher |
| Numbering | LCV/{FY}/{NNN}, prefix overridable |
| Permissions | canViewPurchases to see · canManagePurchases to draft, apply, cancel |
Freight is not an expense; it is part of the stock — until the stock is sold. The voucher is how it gets there, Apply is the moment it moves, and every day you wait, more of it lands in P&L instead of on the shelf.