FAQ Inventory Manufacturing

FAQ:Why Did QuickBooks Change My Builds To “Pending”?

QuickBooks inventory is date sensitive. In addition, the build transaction requires that you have enough component parts on hand to issue the build.

If you issue a build transaction, then make some sort of change that decreases the quantity on hand of a component part so that there isn’t enough on hand on the build date, QuickBooks will change the existing builds to pending.

This can be due to an inventory adjustment, or a change in another build for a subassembly.

Remember that QuickBooks is very senstive to dates, so make sure that the dates of your adjustments (and builds) are correct.

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11 Comments

  • We get this problem occasionally when paying the bill for inventory items, but not when we actually recieve the inventory! Very strange.

  • I am trying the trial version of your software, as I think it might be the solution to the amount of time it takes for me to build assemblies every week. Hours and hours!

    However I have two questions:
    Is it possible to process multiple pending builds using your software?

    Is it possible to back-date builds or will it always default to the current date?

    Thank you in advance

  • @Steven Parker
    I just ran into exactly what you’re talking about. The problem is this. We had some products that were delivered but due to some damaged product, we had not received the bill before we needed the parts in production. No problem, just create an item receipt to get the items into inventory so we can build and sell our assembled products. However, when the bill came in, the invoice date was later than the first build. When the bill was entered against the inventory and the invoice date was set to the date of the bill, it throws it pending because that date is now beyond what you showed on hand from the item receipt. What I did was set the date of the bill to match the item receipt and then manually set the date due to match the net 30 from the invoice date.

    Anyone know why the bill date would affect the Item Receipt date?

    • The bill and receipt transaction are all keyed off of the “enter bills” screen, which has one date. To get around this you have to separate things – create a bill and use the “expenses” tab to post the value to an account, then do an inventory adjustment to receive the items and post against that same account. Then you have two transactions and can enter separate dates.

  • That’s fine but when you are not using the enterprise edition, you have to be in single user to adjust inventory which means I have to have everyone shut down, switch to single user, adjust inventory and then switch back to multi-user. It was just easier for me to set the bill to the date of the received and set the due date manually to maintain what bills are due. Plus, it really seems to defeat the purpose of the whole section of Quickbooks. Receive items without a bill, and bill for received items should handle this type of date discrepancy and should not require the work-around you describe. To me, that’s the same as saying: “You can receive items to use for assemblies before you get the bill, but when the bill comes in I’m gonna cause screw your inventory up”

    • Charlie, I don’t write the software, just try to work with it. There are many things that they could do differently to save us all a bunch of work…

  • Charlie, I didn’t mean to come off like I was blaming you for the situation. I’ve learned that there are a lot of issues that require a work-around in Quickbook. I found my work-around to this issue but it didn’t make sense to have to do it that way. I just wanted to reply to your solution that manually setting the date due and leaving the bill date the same as the item receipt date would also keep the pending builds from triggering and may be a more viable solution for people that can’t switch to single user easily to do an inventory adjustment. Sorry if I came off that way. I really didn’t mean it to.

  • hi Charlie, We are the manufacturers of cleaning material.. we combine different raw materials to make 1 item.. now, we put them in 1L, 2L, 5L nd so on… the problem is how am I gonna make the measurements in QB Premier that I used which quantity of what in 5L only and in 1L only and so on?

    • Sindi, you would use inventory assembly items and “build” products, most likely. Click on the “manufacturing” menu item at the top of this blog, I have a number of articles about QuickBooks and manufacturing. Start with the oldest, they give a general overview.

      Note that a number of these articles have been moved to another blog, “QuickBooks and Beyond”, but they are the same articles.