Freight, Customs and Landed Cost
A car leaving the importer's yard at 74,000 does not arrive in Riyadh costing 74,000. There is sea freight, there is customs clearance, there is a truck from the port. Al-Sahra paid 15,000 on the February shipment, and if that 15,000 does not reach the six cars then every margin the showroom reports afterwards is wrong by 2,500 a car.
This page is about how it gets there. The short answer is that it uses the ordinary supply-chain landed-cost mechanism, that it works only on the Car Purchase Invoice, and that there is nothing car-specific about it at all.
Required licence
srvcenter-subitems for the car documents; the additional-cost mechanism itself is standard supply chain.
There are no customs or freight fields in the buying chain
Start with the disappointment, because it saves a lot of hunting.
No document in the Car Purchases chain has a customs field, a freight field or a clearance field. Not the order, not the pro-forma, not the invoice, not the return. There is no "duty" column and no "landed cost" tab where you type an amount.
The customs fields on the car file are descriptive text, and nothing more
The car record's Document Control Data tab carries customs list number, customs paid, customs paid date, customs release number, customs release date, vessel name and carrier. Every one of them is typed by hand, and none of them is connected to any amount, any account or any cost calculation.
They are there so the paperwork is filed against the right chassis. Filling them in does not capitalise anything. Do not use them as a substitute for the mechanism described below, and do not expect the two to agree.
How the charges actually reach the cars
Import charges are entered as service-item lines on the same purchase invoice as the cars, and the invoice spins them off into a Receipt Additional Cost document that spreads them over the received vehicles.
The chain, step by step:
- Create the expense items. Each charge you want to capitalise needs an item of type Service, with its expense item field filled in — that field is what marks a service line as a capitalisable cost rather than an ordinary expense. Al-Sahra has three: sea freight, customs clearance, inland transport.
- Configure the invoice's document term. Three settings do the work:
- إنشاء سند تكاليف إستلام إضافية مع بنود الخدمات (Create Receipt Additional Cost With Service Items) — the master switch. Nothing happens without it.
- دفتر سند التكاليف الإضافية and توجيه سند التكاليف الإضافية (additional cost document book and term) — where the generated document is filed.
- توزيع التكلفة على أساس كمية الاستلام (Distribute Cost Based On Receipt Quantity) — the distribution basis.
- Put the charges on the invoice. Alongside the six car lines, add one line per charge using the service items. They carry an amount and no quantity of cars.
- Commit. The invoice collects the service lines whose item is a service item with an expense item, and generates a Receipt Additional Cost document in the book and term you named, cloning those lines. The reference appears in the read-only سند التكاليف الإضافية field on the invoice header, and the generated document is listed on the بنود مصروفات (Expense items) tab.
- The cost lands per car. Because the car record is an item dimension, inventory cost is held against the pairing of item and car. The spread charge therefore reaches each individual chassis, not just the model — which is what makes a per-car margin meaningful.
If the condition later stops holding — you remove the service lines, or untick the term option — the generated document is deleted again on re-processing.
The worked example
SIPI-2026-021, 10 February 2026. Six cars at 74,000, and three service lines:
| Expense | Amount |
|---|---|
| Sea freight | 9,000 |
| Customs clearance | 4,200 |
| Inland transport | 1,800 |
| Total additional cost | 15,000 |
The invoice generates RAC-2026-009, which distributes the 15,000 across the six cars by receipt quantity — 15,000 ÷ 6 = 2,500 each.
Landed cost per car = 74,000 + 2,500 = 76,500.
That is the figure the invoice's read-only unit cost column shows on each line once the additional-cost document has been processed, the figure held on CAR-000318's cost row, and the figure that is relieved to cost of sales when the car is eventually sold for 87,000 — giving a gross margin of 10,500.
Quote 76,500 wherever a car's cost is mentioned. It is the number, not 74,000.
Where the accounting goes
The additional-cost side of the entry comes from the invoice term's التكاليف الإضافية (Additional Cost) accounting side, backed by the module-level additional-cost debit and credit accounts. It is a standard accounting-side configuration; the amounts and the distribution are what this mechanism contributes.
The other three documents add nothing
Only the purchase invoice can carry landed cost
The Car Purchase Order, the Car Proforma Purchase Invoice and the Car Purchase Return have no additional-cost reference and generate no additional-cost document. Nothing on them capitalises anything, and the pro-forma in particular is not a distribution base — its value is spread over nothing.
If a charge arrives after the purchase invoice has been raised, put it on a separate Receipt Additional Cost document directly, against the same stock receipt. Do not expect a later document in the car chain to pick it up.
Two practical notes
Check the unit cost column after the invoice has processed. The additional cost reaches the line through a generated document processed in the background, so the invoice's cost columns are not meaningful the instant you press save. If they still read 74,000 some minutes later, the usual cause is the term option not being switched on, or the service item missing its expense item.
Keep one shipment to one invoice. The distribution is over the receipt quantity of the invoice that carries the charges. Splitting six cars across two invoices and putting all the freight on one of them gives you three cars at 79,000 and three at 74,000 — arithmetically what you asked for, and almost never what you meant.