At the company I work for, we purchase materials direct to jobs 90+% of the time. Due to minimum order quantities and other factors, we have a somewhat significant amount of parts on hand, even though we don’t intentionally keep inventory. This includes both raw material (steel, aluminum, etc) and purchased commercial components.
For the inventory that we do have on-hand, we want to cycle count. Unfortunately, Epicor’s Cycle Count process does not consider ‘Non-Stock’ parts in its generation of the list of parts to be counted.
I don’t want to change our parts to Non-Stock=false due to the way it affects behavior of Job Materials, Buy to Order SO lines, etc.
Has anyone encountered this before, and do you have any suggested solutions or workarounds?
First off, “Non-Stock” rarely means what people think. “Qty Bearing” is the setting that makes what most people consider a stocked part.
You can make a part Qty Bearing (meaning Epicor will track the QOH), and use GL Controls so that it is not part of inventory.
For example we had a shop supply that would occasionally be used in a product. We made the part qty bearing so we could kind of track it, but setup a Part Class (with a GL Control that expensed the part upon receipt).
PO PLaced for the shop supply
a. No effect on QOH
b. No effect on GL
PO Receipt
a. QOH increased
b. Cost is immediately expensed to Shop Supplies. No affect on Inventory GL
Occasional Misc Issue or Qty Adj to square up the QOH as it is used. The Shop Supply Acct is used as the offsetting account. So no net effect on the GL
a. QOH decreased
b. No affect on Inventory GL, nor Shop Expense GL
Part is required in production, issued to job.
a. QOH decreased
b. Shop Supplies GL is debited, Job WIP is credited. No affect on Inventory GL
standard disclaimer - I may have my credits and debits swapped.
Thanks, but I understand the difference, and everything is working as intended except that I can’t cycle count the stuff we have on the shelf. We want all of these parts to affect QOH and hit the inventory GL, show up on Stock Status reports, etc. The problem is that our cycle count parts list is always empty because all of our parts are considered Non-Stock. If there was an ‘Include Non-Stock’ option for Cycle Counts as there is for Stock Status report, that would be wonderful. But alas…
We could solve the problem by changing the Non-Stock option to false on all of our parts, but then when we engineer jobs the materials do not default to Purchase Direct (we want them to). It also has some other effects.
Okay. I didn’t realize that Non-Stock were excluded from cycle counts.
Could you run a “mini-physical inventory” of just those parts? I’m assuming that the end results of cycle counts and physical inventories are practically the same - they take counts and compare them to the QOH, and create inventory adj’s to get QOH correct.
We could do something like that, but that casts too wide of a net. We lose the ability to generate a semi-random selection of parts to count, that a normal cycle count offers.
I forgot that the ‘Initialize Physical Inventory’ has the ‘Include Non-Stock’ option, which makes it even more frustrating that Cycle Count does not.
