Adding costs to items in inventory

awarn

Hi,

Here is the request I am dealing with - and I need this to work with a BE license. I know that this will be done with custom code, so any suggestions on how to code this to avoid problems later woudl be greatly appreciated!

I need to be able to add costs to an item (perhaps in the form of item charges), without creating a payable. Really estiamted costs.
So normally a PO with an item charge creates value entries, balanced by the payable to the vendor, and what we need is value entries, balanced by a GL account.

The example might be something like a warehouse fee - the bill might be quarterly but an estimate of the costs need to be added weekly or even daily, in order to more accurately determine the price that the goods need to be in order to make a profit. Item Charges on a PO would work really well except for the creation of the payable...

I am thinking of creating a journal or document that would use an item charge and assign it to a selection of inventory, and would post in a similar way as item charges, creating value entries and hitting a GL account, when the actual costs are known that account will be backed out and the actual PO entered (but of course this could be long after the goods are sold, we are talking about perishable food products). It would be in a sense simpler than the PO / item charges because with that you get value entries, vendor ledger entries, and gl entries, and with the new journal / document you get value entries & gl entries.

So... any tips on how one might go about this, or things to watch out for would be appreciated.

I do know that this may end up not being a very elegant solution - and if ther eis an alternative to adding a multitude of code I am up for that too - but if the suggestion is 'just do not do it', well that is not something I can take back

Thanks!

Cali_Koppers

1) You can have a table behind the scenes that would record your "additional cost". This table might have Document Type, Document No., Document Line No., Item No, Amount. This will be for any item that would apply.

2) You will then modify your printout to include records in this table so the total cost of your PO will include the "additional cost."

3) When when invoicing your PO, you will need to create a G/L posting to a "virtual vendor" that you really will never pay the estimate AP goes to this vendor. It is just to temporarily hold the funds. This will exclude the additional cost from your AP. Also, make use the table in 1) follows your posted invoice for history purposes.

4) When the additional cost is then realized, you will need to post an Item Charge to the actual vendor you owe. Make sure you are moving funds from and to the right accounts. You might want to start with this manually, but then, once you're comfortable with it, you can automate it.

5) You might also want to credit memo the "virtual vendor" but you really can get away w/o having to because you can post purchasing to a different G/L account other than the "normal vendors" using a different posting setup. You can then just filter this vendor out when you run your AP Ageing.