Charges and requisitions: the two lists either side of a purchaseالأعباء والطلبات: القائمتان على جانبَي الشراء

Guides 43 and 44 cover the purchase documents themselves. Two more lists sit in the same group and neither is a document you would think to look for: one records what a purchase cost you beyond the supplier's price, and the other records what somebody asked you to buy before any of it started.

1. Charges - the costs that are not on the supplier's invoice

Freight, customs, clearance, insurance, handling. The supplier invoices you for the goods; these arrive separately and they are just as much part of what the goods cost.

The columns say how Libra thinks about that:

• Charges on and Related to attach the charge to what it belongs to, which is what makes it more than a stray expense. A charge tied to a shipment can be spread across what was in it.
• Percentage is how that spreading is expressed.
• Total LBP and Total USD carry the amount in both currencies - useful here in particular, because import charges are very often billed in a different currency from the goods.
• Posted is a tick box, and it is the giveaway: a charge is a document that posts to your books, not a note. Until it is posted it has not affected anything.

Enter charges before you value the stock, not after. A cost that arrives late still belongs to the goods, but by then the items may already have been sold at a margin calculated without it. This is the single most common way a purchase looks more profitable than it was.

2. Requisitions - what somebody asked for

Four columns, and no money anywhere. That absence is the point: a requisition is a request, not a commitment. Somebody in the business needs something; this records the asking, and nothing is owed to anybody yet.

It sits before the purchase order in the chain - request, then order, then goods, then invoice - and its value is entirely in what it lets you answer later: who asked for this, when, and did we ever actually buy it.

Reference is the field that earns its keep. Put the requester's own document number in it - the internal ticket, the site request, the department's form - and the trail from "we need this" to "we paid for this" holds together without anyone maintaining a spreadsheet.