Choose Your Cost Tracking Method
Bookkeep calculates your inventory value in two ways: last cost received or weighted average cost. Your store picks one. This page explains the difference so you can configure your cost tracking correctly.
The setting is a simple toggle and lives in Purchase Orders → Settings.
Bookkeep maintains a full cost ledger for every product/variant no matter which method you use. The setting doesn't change what Bookkeep records internally. It decides what amount gets written to Shopify's cost per item upon receiving commits.
The two methods
Last cost received: Shopify gets the landed cost of your most recent receipt. Whatever you paid last time becomes the value of every unit on hand.
Weighted average cost (WAC): Shopify gets the blended cost of everything you've bought, weighted by how much you bought at each price. See How Weighted Average Cost Works for the full mechanics.
Which one fits your store
The two cost methods answer different questions: last cost tells you what an item costs to replace today, WAC tells you what you actually paid for what's sitting on the shelf.
Last cost received works well when supplier pricing is stable, you buy each item from a single source, and you'd rather see inventory valued at today's replacement price. It's also the easier number to explain to someone reading a report, because it always traces back to one invoice.
Weighted average cost is the better fit when prices move, when you buy the same item from several suppliers, or when freight varies from shipment to shipment. It's the conventional method for inventory valuation, so it's usually what your accountant expects to see.
Whichever method you choose, the cost in question is the landed cost: unit price, plus allocated fees like freight or duty, minus any allocated discounts. Neither method uses the bare price from the purchase order line.
Configure applicables fees such as shipping or tarrifs as well as discounts at the time you set up Bookkeep Inventory, in **Settings → Landed cost fees **. Define each fee type once: Specify a name, choose a default allocation method (by quantity or value), then apply the fee while Receiving. The allocation method is worth a moment's thought before you set it, because splitting a freight charge evenly across a cheap item and an expensive one distorts both: see what allocation does to your numbers.
For the full setup — fee types, allocation methods, allocating amounts by hand, and fees that should stay out of item cost — see Configure Fees and Discounts.
What gets recorded
Every cost push to Shopify is logged with the value sent and whether it succeeded, alongside your supplier cost history and the landed cost allocations on each receipt. You can review all of it from the purchase order or from the product variant.
If a receipt was entered wrong, it gets repaired rather than erased — see Fix a Receipt: Voids and Cost Corrections.