All Entries in the "Manufacturing" Category
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.
Tracking BOM Revisions
In most manufacturing businesses you will find that the structure of the Bill of Materials for items will change over time. Today I’ll discuss how QuickBooks deals with these changes.
Manufacturing Bill of Materials
In my post on QuickBooks manufacturing basics I discussed the essential nuts and bolts (sorry for the pun) of building assemblies in QuickBooks. Today I’ll talk about structuring your bills of material (BOM’s). A BOM is a simple thing, right? You want to build something, you just enter in the list of all the parts that you use, and there you are. On some levels that is correct, but if you are looking for inventory accuracy, accounting accuracy, and want to make your life easy, you need to give this some more thought.
Importing Inventory with Excel
There are a number of reasons why you may want to use Excel to import items to your item list in QuickBooks: Converting a list from another program, making copies of existing items, bulk addition of a new product line, and more. Today I’m going to give you an overview of how to use Excel to manipulate the item list.
QuickBooks Manufacturing Tutorial
QuickBooks has a “Manufacturing & Wholesale” edition, but there is a definite lack of documentation on how to actually use QuickBooks in a manufacturing business. This posting is the first in a series that will give you some guidelines on how to best use QuickBooks in a manufacturing environment. I’ll start off with some basics, and work our way up through some more complicated scenarios.
Editing your Bill of Materials
Today’s posting is a quick tip about editing a Bill of Materials for an assembly item in QuickBooks. A client was asking me about a feature in my CCRQBOM manufacturing plug-in program the other day, talking about a problem related to deleting a line in the BOM. There was a detail line in the middle of the BOM that was to be removed, and the only way he could come up with was to delete the item ID in the line. This, unfortunately, leaves a “hole” in the middle of the BOM.
