Normally what you are talking about is referred to as landed cost if at the purchase end. Actual cost is more commonly used to refer to stock accounting where you can identify the cost of each item you ship (aka identification costing) although I know countries differ on this. Anyway the trick for landed cost is that you are going to get one invoice from a shipping company which could be for multiple purchases especially if using a freight consolidator, so that cost needs to be spread across multiple purchases. Because there are incoming invoices that need to have their values reallocated from an expense account to a stock valuation account, but at the time of receiving the goods you may not know what those costs are yet it is a tricky issue. The 2 landed cost implementations I have been part of for OpenERP handled it differently, one created a shipment object and consolidated purchase order lines there as well as the incoming costs, the other one reallocated the incoming expense invoices to either PO lines or already received stock.
Also more normally the allocation of costs is - for import duties - the actual import duty, but for other costs shipping, insurance, clearance, storage it is done by value. I do not think carrier computation will work so easily but hopefully I am wrong. This is because container rates vary so often. -- [email protected] mailing list
