Hey all – my company handles about 500 trucks of freight inbound and outbound / month. All this freight is incurred internally as an expense and not charged to the customer or supplier. The costs hit our gross profit level on the individual deal.
My understanding is that Epicor has no way to add an outbound freight expense at thecontainer shipment entry that is incurred internally (in other words hits the COGS of an order / gross profit) rather than being charged to the customer. We know the Miscellaneous Charges option can do whatever charge we want but it largely is hitting the customer invoice. However, we never charge customers freight – we incur the cost (ocean freight, drayage, domestic shipping, etc.)
Has anyone come across this or have any solutions? I am dealing with a funky work around now and wanted to see if any other ideas were out there!
From what I understand, even if you do a Miscellaneous charge that uses a GL control that will hit a COGS GL, the charge (say $650 for outbound freight) will still hit the customer invoice/AR.
I need the $650 expense to hit the AP as something we owe. It might hit the right GL control from a P&L perspective, but it’s not something that become a payable we owe.
Hmm, this might count as a funky solution, but couldn’t you use a PO for shipping and associate it with either an order line or an outsourced operation?
So have a 0$ Buy To Order line on the order “Ocean Freight”, and then make a PO for it at the $650? Since you are selling it at 0$ it shouldn’t hit the customer invoice, but it should get you owing stuff in AP.
You can do the same idea with an outsourced operation, if you want to do it at the part level.
Yes the crux issue is that these are company incurred costs, have no impact to customer or AR. They are just like an additional expense on an order at the COGS level.
Material Cost: $100
Outbound Freight Cost: $50
Order Value to Customer: $200
Profit: (Profit = Sales - Material Cost - Freight): $200-$100-$50 = $50
I will play with doing POs for shipping (maybe using freight as a non quantity bearing part). Just with our volume (500-600 trucks/month) I was hoping we could just do a miscellaneous charge that hits our AP but it doesn’t seem possible.
We did review handling them as Job Costs but it was an extremely cumbersome process. I can see if that can be simplified.
Yes we have been talking about that. We use Landed Cost for material coming into our sites. I was seeing if we could almost mirror the landed cost module on the outbound as we do a ton of container shipments as well that we want to track. It didn’t seem possible.
I don’t believe it is. This is one thing we were disappointed with when moving to Epicor. They don’t have misc. costs at the job level. You either have to absorb it in overhead (which won’t show the cost ON the job) or you can buy “Freight” to the job (which WILL show on the job cost) but you have to go through the PO/Receipt process. So, yes, it is a pain.
There may be a way to create a BPM that would automatically create a PO and process the receipt… never went down that path (over my head/skill set). But I bet it could be done.
I agree we have a lot of odd and end expenses we don’t want to hit on the total overhead level but on an order by order gross profit level and freight is the main one.
I think getting heavy into the BPM options might be what is needed at this volume.
Maybe make a BPM that automatically adds a line to any order created called “Free Freight”
Free Freight has a BOM with a single fixed qty ‘material’ called LandedCosts.
Then when accounting goes to invoice the freight, use the Job Miscellaneous Line invoice line type, and put the invoice towards the LandedCosts material on the “Free Freight” part.
If you don’t want the FreeFreight part showing up, it wouldn’t be hard to filter it out on the SSRS report.
I think it would be slightly less complicated BPMs than the PO workflow, which needs to be approved, received, etc.
Your Miscellaneous charge would need to be at the line level on the invoice or it won’t be considered part of the cost.
You might need to add it as a miscellaneous charge on the job as well.
as we do a ton of container shipments as well that we want to track. It didn’t seem possible.