Lauri,

Have you thought about the charges connected to the sales activities?

Steve

Expense the items on the front end as non-inventory items and don’t track them individually as inventory.  Then assign a packing and handling charge directly on the customer order to accumulate that expense to move it along as a sales related charge.  It won’t be one-for-one, but for the 80% of the transactions you can get there without tons of work.  If there are very large specific packing crates or skids that you need to track closer to actual cost, you would have to manage them as specific charges.  So it depends on what your mix of packing materials looks like.

Thanks ShawnBerk. This sounds like the solution we are after. I presume Steve also hinted to same direction so thanks to you too.

One question however: is it possible to assign the packing and handling charge to a customer order only for cost allocation purposes? Our objective is not to show packing & handling charges in the customer invoice by default.

Cheers,

Lauri

@Lauri 

Hmmm, that is a different wrinkle, but one I understand.  You don’t want to show the charges to the customer directly or pass them on even at cost.  What you want to do is roll up the item as a cost into the total cost of the item.  In that case, Sales Charges won’t help.  The way we do this particular version is starting the same as I said, expensing the item up front so the charges drop into an account as period cost initially.  Then, each packing item is assigned an inventory part number, included in the applicable structure for the product and costed so that it appears as part of the total cost of the manufacturing structure.  Where this gets tricky is in how you want to maintain the inventory level of the item and whether you want to show consumption.  If you want to show the quantity required and consumption and thus the actual cost of each item, then you have to have a way of incrementing the inventory QOH so you always have enough “on hand” even though you aren’t tracking the inventory. These types of items have to be maintained in a separate warehouse and accounting group so you don’t double count them as real inventory (they were already expensed).  We do the incrementing of inventory nightly using a migration job and particular settings on the inventory part to know which ones need incremented and keep them at 1000 on hand at the start of every day.

All of this to say….there isn’t a direct out of the box solution for what you want to do that I know of, at least we didn’t find one and created this methodology for our solution.

You can recuperate this cost by going to the freight interface and setting up a fee to charge for handling and have accounting net them to see how well you are doing then adjust