Purchase price variance, by vendor and material

No standard report compares the purchase order price against the standard cost by material and vendor. That comparison is the question purchasing reviews exist to answer, and the delivered tools do not build it. So practitioners assemble it by hand: line-item reports filtered to the PPV account, or cost-center workarounds that press allocation machinery into service as a reporting tool.

The community forums carry versions of this question continuously from 2008 to 2023, across every release in between. The universal journal did not close it. Variance lands scattered across goods-receipt-stage and invoice-receipt-stage postings, and no delivered view brings the stages together by vendor and material. Splitting third-party purchases from intercompany ones is a further custom build on top.

Variance posts at two moments. At goods receipt, the gap between the order price and the standard cost posts as variance. At invoice receipt, the gap between the invoiced price and the order price posts as more variance. The first stage is a standard-setting question for the costing team. The second is a vendor-behavior question for purchasing. A single account balance mixes them into one number nobody owns.

Sample values are illustrative, never client data. The bottom row ties to the general ledger balance for the month, which is the reconciliation that makes the pivot trustworthy.

The build is a variance fact in your warehouse at the vendor, material, plant, and month grain, fed by the extraction pattern. Each row carries the receipt-stage and invoice-stage amounts separately, a third-party or intercompany flag, and keys back to the journal postings underneath. The purchasing review becomes a filter, and every number on screen drills to the documents that produced it.

-- worst invoice-stage variance by vendor, one quarter
SELECT vendor, SUM(ir_stage_amount) AS invoice_stage_ppv
FROM fct_ppv_month
WHERE fiscal_month BETWEEN '2026-01' AND '2026-03'
  AND trade_type = 'third_party'
GROUP BY 1 ORDER BY 2 DESC

The uncleared side of the same purchase order lines has its own page, receipt and invoice clearing aging. Same tables landed once, two questions answered.