19.8. Inventory Reporting: Margin, Write-offs, and Ghost Usage

Inventory's reporting answers the owner's questions: are we making money on hardware, where is stock disappearing, and are we giving parts away without billing them?

Margin report

Revenue, COGS, and margin per product over a date range, costed from what each unit actually cost you.

Inventory → Margin shows revenue, cost of goods sold, and margin per product over a date range, plus totals. The numbers are grounded in reality, not list prices:

• Revenue comes from the prices on fulfilled sales order lines.
• COGS is the actual cost captured at the moment each unit or quantity was consumed — per-unit costs for serialized products, moving average for bulk, including any landed costs you applied.

If margins look thin on a product, check its vendor price list and whether freight/duty landed costs are being applied — both flow straight into this report.

Inventory value

For a point-in-time balance number rather than a period's profit, the valuation view (reached from the dashboard's inventory-health footer) totals on-hand quantity times unit cost per location, with a grand total. It is the figure to hand your accountant at close, and it reconciles to the dashboard's inventory-health total.

Where a QuickBooks Online or Xero integration is connected, an accounting alignment check lists your stock-tracked SKUs against the inventory items in the accounting system, so the two ledgers do not drift apart unnoticed.

Warranty expiry

Every serialized unit can carry a warranty expiry date, captured at receiving and carried onto the client's asset at delivery. AlgaPSA surfaces the units whose warranty lapses within a horizon — flagged for the near term and available as a report you can run further out. Treat it as a pipeline: an expiring warranty on managed gear is a refresh quote waiting to be sent.

Write-offs report

Inventory → Write-offs is the audit-the-auditor view: every manual adjustment and retirement in a window — who made it, the reason they entered, and what it was worth — with totals per user, and a net written-off vs found-and-added summary. Cycle-count corrections are labeled separately from ad-hoc adjustments, so a healthy count program doesn't look like shrinkage. The report reads from the permanent ledger; it cannot be edited.

Ghost usage

Ghost usage is the classic MSP leak: a technician closes a hardware ticket — swapped the drive, replaced the AP — but never recorded the part, so it was never billed and stock silently drifts. Inventory → Ghost Usage hunts for it:

Ghost Usage funnels closed hardware tickets down to the ones that recorded no parts, with optional AI triage to grade each candidate.

1. It scans closed tickets in the window and narrows to hardware-scope work.
2. Tickets with no recorded parts or materials become ghost candidates.
3. Optionally, AI classification (an Enterprise feature with the AI Assistant add-on, enabled per tenant) reads each candidate and grades whether hardware was likely involved, with a confidence level.
4. You confirm or dismiss each candidate; confirmed ones become a worklist to record the material — which restores both the billing and the stock accuracy.

Where the other numbers live

• The dashboard surfaces day-to-day money and exceptions: unbilled-but-shipped value, month-to-date margin, the needs-attention worklist, deployment readiness, the sales-order pipeline, and this week's activity — see Inventory Overview.
• Stock Units answers unit-level questions (by serial or MAC, any status), with status/client filters and CSV export — see Products and Stock Settings.
• The client's own equipment, orders, and RMAs appear on the client command center, in the install-base card and timeline — see Client Command Center.