When selling goods, you may need to pass on additional costs to your customers, such as fuel surcharges, freight levies, or other variable fees. Unleashed does not have a dedicated surcharge field on Sales Orders, but you can easily handle these costs by adding them as line items using a Never Diminishing Product (NDP). This ensures your invoices accurately reflect the true cost to your customer and keeps your records clean and auditable.
Why this matters
Surcharges and levies are a normal part of doing business, particularly in industries affected by fluctuating fuel, freight, or handling costs. Failing to capture these on your Sales Orders can result in:
Undercharging customers and absorbing costs that should be passed on.
Inaccurate financial reporting, as additional revenue isn't recorded against the order.
Audit and reconciliation issues, with charges appearing outside of your normal order workflow.
By adding surcharges as a line item, they are clearly visible to your customer on the invoice and are correctly captured in your sales data.
Set up a surcharge or levy product
To add a surcharge or levy to your Sales Orders, first create a dedicated Never Diminishing Product (NDP). An NDP is ideal for this purpose because it is not tracked in inventory; it exists purely to represent a fee or charge.
Navigate to Inventory > Products and create a new product.
Give it a product code and descriptive name, such as Fuel Surcharge or Freight Levy.
Set the Product Type to Never Diminishing.
Set a Default Sell Price that reflects the rate you intend to charge per unit. For a percentage-based levy, set this as the decimal value of the percentage, for example, 0.10 for a 10% levy.
Save the product.
🤓 Tip: You can create multiple NDP surcharge products for different levy types, e.g., fuel, freight, handling, so each is reported separately.
Add a surcharge or levy to a Sales Order
Once your NDP surcharge product is set up, you can add it to any open Sales Order as a line item.
For example, the total value of line items on the Sales Order is $400.00, and you wish to add a 10% fuel levy ($40.00).
Open the relevant Sales Order.
Finish adding all your standard product line items as normal.
Check the order total at the bottom of the order; in this example, it is $400.00.
Add a new line item and select your Fuel Surcharge NDP.
Set the Unit Price to 0.10, your default sell price.
Set the Quantity to 400, equal to your order total of $400.00.
This calculates as: 400 × $0.10 = $40.00, which is 10% of the order total.
Save or confirm the order.
📌Note: Changes made to the product and prices on the Sales Order after the surcharge or levy product has been added will not change the surcharge or levy product's price or quantity automatically.
Best Practices
Always add the surcharge as the last line item, after all other products have been entered, so you can base the quantity on the correct order total.
The quantity entered should equal the order subtotal in your customer's currency, and the unit price should equal the levy rate as a decimal, e.g., 5% = 0.05, 10% = 0.10, 15% = 0.15.
The surcharge will appear as a separate, clearly labelled line on your customer's invoice, ensuring full transparency.
Because the product is an NDP, no stock movements are created and will not be included on the Transaction Enquiry report; the charge is purely financial.