Small data fix for Sean. He had done an import (uploaded new inventory items) and was missing the vendor. I had to go in and update a few records and tables to get it correct. Phone call with Sean to do a quick follow-up. Spent an hour fixing a file for Sean. Adding in a default vendor field for a CSV part upload page. Pushed up new files to all servers.

Light research on vendor credits. We already allow for these, through special accounts. Cory and Steve want me to look into helping to tighten things up a bit. They can get kinda interesting. All kinds of situations may arise and/or be needed. I watched a couple of small videos online how other software products take care of it. As a note, it seems like a challenge, no matter how you do it. Here are a few things that I found - small notes:

- Vendor credits can come from returns, discounts, or overpayments

- You want your A/P's decrease

- Back in the day, we use to go to the actual PO or expense and put a new line item on the record stating that we got some kinda of vendor credit. We would then alter what was owed and/or paid. The old way was a very manual process.

- We already allow you to claim and use a vendor credit. We can back tie it to a vendor, a PO, or an expense/receipt. Without being super technical, you are somewhat declaring a new "almost like cash - asset" that can be used as a form of payment on a PO or expense/receipt. Currently, the missing piece is a possible offsetting entry to help keep things in balance. You can't just declare a new virtual asset without adjusting the COGS or expenses or inventory portion of the financials.

- You can map to an expense on the income statement. You can also decrease the inventory value, based on what happened.

- Other software companies had to create normal bills and then negative bills to record the entry.

- Apply the credit to the actual bill

- You may have to make a deposit or put a check back in the bank from the vendor

- There seems to be a need for clearing out the account - a manual offset of some sort

- So many situations... they keep changing... not just one simple solution

- We were thinking of doing an auto entry on the COGS for that vendor but it may not always go straight to COGS. There are a number of possible variables that we may need to consider. As a follow-up to this note, Steve and I were talking about maybe looking up the vendor type switch to see if the vendors were inventory vendors or service vendors. We met over the phone and then on a GoToMeeting session later in the day, after I had written these notes. If we do go with the new option, then we could maybe automate things based off of that.

- As a fun side note, eventually, we need to add in values for in-store credits. those too have some tricky questions about how they came to be and where they came from. All part of the fun.