Inventory accounting

Ordara uses a lifetime weighted-average purchase cost for inventory. It does not reset the cost pool when on-hand reaches zero, and it does not use FIFO or purchase layers. A later restock therefore joins the same lifetime average used for the product's current Cost / Unit display.

Physical quantity and priced quantity

Two quantities serve different purposes:

• Ordered quantity is the surviving physical quantity from linked, non-cancelled order lines. Unsold quantity, on-hand reconciliation, and the portfolio item count continue to use this quantity.
• Priced quantity is the portion of that physical quantity whose purchase cost is known. The weighted-average denominator uses priced quantity only.

A parser-reported price of zero is ambiguous: the source may mean that the item was free, or it may mean that no price was found. Ordara therefore treats parser zero as an unresolved price. Its units remain in physical counts but do not dilute the known-price average.

Entering a cost override is explicit price provenance. An override of exactly $0.00 means the user has confirmed that the acquisition was free; its quantity is included in priced quantity and can produce a complete, valid zero-dollar cost basis. Clearing the override returns a parser-zero line to unresolved.

Provisional costs and transaction snapshots

When some contributing prices are unresolved, Ordara may display the weighted average of the known-price portion. The product, portfolio profit card, product ledger, Profit & Loss statement, and CSV exports mark affected figures as incomplete. Sales and expense-producing write-offs recorded in this state keep their unit-cost snapshot empty.

A sale or expense write-off receives a snapshot only when:

1. at least one surviving unit has explicit price provenance;
2. no contributing linked line has an unresolved parser-zero price; and
3. no contributing line is awaiting product-match review.

Resolving the final missing price recomputes the complete lifetime weighted average and fills eligible empty snapshots as a resolution_estimate. The fill is one-way: later enrichment, overrides, restocks, merges, or repeated reconciliation never overwrite a populated snapshot. An explicitly confirmed zero-dollar basis is eligible and is stored as zero, not as unknown.

Snapshot provenance describes when Ordara knew the estimate:

• recorded: available when the transaction was entered;
• migration_estimate: available when snapshot support was introduced; and
• resolution_estimate: available when an incomplete basis later became complete.

These values are estimates of carrying cost at those times, not reconstructed event-time historical costs.

Existing populated snapshots

Ordara conservatively retains populated historical snapshots. Earlier versions could divide cost by parser-zero quantity and populate a diluted recorded or migration_estimate snapshot. Those populated values are not silently rewritten by this change.

Reliable automatic reconstruction is not possible: the database does not keep an event-time history of parser prices, overrides, link review state, order enrichment, or the exact cost pool visible when each transaction was recorded. Recomputing from today's rows could replace one estimate with a different and equally unprovable estimate. Current incomplete products are disclosed and all still-empty snapshots follow the corrected policy, but previously populated snapshots remain a historical limitation that should be reviewed before using old reports for accounting or tax decisions.