All Entries in the "Manufacturing" Category
QuickBooks Manufacturing Forecasts: Component Demand
Having an adequate supply of component parts is critical to a manufacturer. If you run out of something, you can’t build your assembly. If you can’t build your assembly, you can’t fulfill customer orders. So let’s talk about how to avoid this if you are using QuickBooks.
Reconciling QuickBooks Inventory Balances
An important part of controlling your inventory is to make sure that your company financial statements match your inventory status. The inventory asset balance in your Balance Sheet should match the value in the Inventory Valuation Summary report. Unfortunately, these values don’t always match, and in this article I’ll talk about some reasons why this can happen, and ways to reconcile your inventory balances.
Shipping Costs and QuickBooks Inventory
What is the “cost” of an inventory item that you purchase? For many businesses we talk about the “landed cost” of the item, which can include not only the purchase cost of the item, but also the shipping cost of the item. In this article I’ll talk about a few ways to handle this in QuickBooks.
The landed cost of an item is usually considered to be the cost of the product plus any relevant logistics costs, such as transportation, warehousing, handling and so forth. The can also be called the total landed cost or net landed cost.
Understanding QuickBooks Inventory Cost
If you are using QuickBooks to manage your inventory, you need to understand how QuickBooks deals with the cost of inventory items. I’ve been answering a lot of questions about this in the Intuit Community Forums lately, so here is a quick rundown of how things work.
Understanding QuickBooks Reorder and Build Points
It’s never a good idea to run out of important inventory items that you resell or use in manufacturing. In simple inventory control systems we often set a minimum stocking level that is used to generate a warning when an item falls below a particular on-hand balance, so that you can order (or build) more of the item just before you run out. In this article I’ll examine how QuickBooks handles this process.
Outsourced or Sub-Contract Work in QuickBooks
Many manufacturing (and other) businesses send materials out to another firm to perform some intermediary processing of the item. This can be plating of a component part, populating a PC board with circuit components, and many other tasks. I’ll give you some ideas of how you might handle this in QuickBooks.
Why Won’t QuickBooks Let Me Build This Assembly?
Computer programs can be frustrating when they don’t let you do what you want. They are supposed to be a tool that helps you run your business! One complaint that I hear often from QuickBooks manufacturing users is that the program won’t let them build an assembly when they can see that they have the necessary parts on hand. Today we’ll look at a common cause for this problem.
Manufacturing WIP in QuickBooks
Tracking Work in Progress (WIP) in a manufacturing business can be complicated, depending on the characteristics of your manufacturing process. For an extremely oversimplified definition we can say that WIP is where you are taking items out of your raw material (component) inventory, but haven’t yet put it back into your finished goods inventory. I’m going to offer a tip on a short method of managing this in QuickBooks that may work for many manufacturers.
Groups for Custom Manufacturers
Most QuickBooks users think of Group and Inventory Assembly items as an “either-or” decision – use one or the other. There are times, however, when we can mix the two items to solve problems in QuickBooks. This is particularly useful for custom manufacturers – businesses that produce custom variations of their finished product for each customer.
Groups vs Assemblies
QuickBooks provides two item “types” that can have a list of component items – an Inventory Assembly and a Group. How do they differ, and when is it best to use one instead of the other? Today I’ll list the features of each and how you can use them.
