Seed your cost layers
The five ways to give Landara the cost of your stock so it can cost your Shopify orders with FIFO.
Updated 27 August 2026
Before Landara can report COGS, it needs to know what your stock cost. You provide that as cost layers: immutable receipts of stock at a known unit cost. When an order ships, Landara draws down the oldest layer first (FIFO).
Shopify owns quantity; Landara attaches cost. Cost layers are only about cost. You never maintain a competing stock count in Landara.
The five ways to add cost layers
| Source | Use it when | Where |
|---|---|---|
| Sync opening stock | Getting started, seed a baseline fast | Cost Layers → Sync opening stock |
| Add from PO / invoice | You have a supplier bill for a receipt | Cost Layers → Add from PO/invoice |
| Import a shipment | You calculated landed costs in Landara | Cost Layers → Import shipment |
| Add manual layer | Locally-bought stock, no document | Cost Layers → Add manual layer |
| Record adjustment | Reconciling drift (shrinkage / unrecorded receipt) | Reconcile page |
Start here: sync opening stock
This is the fastest first step. It reads your current Shopify on-hand quantity and unit cost and creates matching opening layers, so your existing stock has a cost from day one.
- Go to Dashboard → COGS → Cost Layers.
- Click Sync opening stock.
- Landara pulls Shopify on-hand + unit cost and creates opening layers per SKU and location.
Opening sync is insert-only. It establishes your baseline once. Run it to get started; don't rely on it to update costs later. For new stock, add a PO/invoice or manual layer.
Settle your Shopify SKUs before you run it, because it happens once per product and running it again skips anything that already has a layer. A SKU you rename afterwards leaves its cost behind under the old code. Costs are a different matter: you do not need them set in Shopify, because you can fill in whatever is missing here. If you would rather set them in Shopify for the whole catalogue at once, Bulk-edit product fields in a spreadsheet does that in the same file as your supplier codes. See also Get your SKUs lined up.
Costs that came from a purchase order or supplier invoice are calculated, not typed, so they cannot be edited on the Cost Layers page. Those rows offer Fix on the shipment instead: correct the document, calculate again, and Landara rebuilds the layers from the new result.
If Shopify has no cost for a product
Shopify's Cost per item field is often empty, and where it is, the layer is created at a cost of zero. Anything you sell from that stock is then costed at nothing, so your COGS report shows sales with no cost of goods against them.
The setup screen lets you type the real costs before you seed, which is the easiest moment to do it. If you have already synced, you can fill them in afterwards on the Cost Layers page, either one at a time or all at once, and sales you have already shipped are re-costed automatically.
See Your COGS report says your goods cost nothing.
Add from a PO or supplier invoice
Upload a supplier bill and Landara turns its lines into cost layers, allocating freight across the lines automatically if the document includes it.
- On Cost Layers, click Add from PO/invoice and upload the document.
- Review the editable preview (batch date, per-line location, unit costs).
- Check the add quantities to Shopify option. It's ticked by default when Shopify is connected: leave it on if Landara should add the received units to Shopify's on-hand, and untick it if you already updated the quantity in Shopify yourself, otherwise the stock is counted twice and shows up as a phantom difference on Reconcile.
- Import. The lines become cost layers.
Re-importing the same PO won't silently change existing costs. A duplicate PO/invoice number prompts you to confirm it's a genuine new receipt before creating new layers.
Manual layers and adjustments
- Add manual layer: for locally-purchased stock or opening balances with no document. You can optionally push the received quantity to Shopify on-hand.
- Record adjustment: on the Reconcile page, to account for shrinkage (stock out) or an unrecorded receipt (stock in).
Check your layers
On Cost Layers you'll see every layer with Qty received vs Remaining (received minus FIFO depletion). Remaining is what still has value on the Valuation page.
