For many productive, commercial and service business entities the most important part of their short–term assets consists of supplies including materials, raw materials, spare parts, small inventory, packaging, auto tires and trading goods.
Supply tracking implies primarily the calculation of supply costs.
This calculation is essential for the later transmission of used or sold supply values to the price of the product, goods or services during their distribution from a storage to the following business process or a direct sale to buyers.
Besides financial monitoring of supply and distribution of supplies (price monitoring), the flow of supplies (input and output) must be monitored materially, i.e. by types and units of measure, which is an entrepreneur’s legal obligation.
One of the entrepreneur’s obligations determined by law is making the inventory (listing) of supplies.
However, besides being an obligation, the list is also a useful tool for determining the actual supply level compared to its recorded level, i.e. it gives answer to: how much of something is actually there compared to how much of something there should be.
