We have expense items that we are setting up to put on the Product Structure that will allow us to perform Where Used and determine what products are impacted by these parts. We do not want to have these in inventory. When I created a few test items and did a purchase order, then received it they are now in inventory. Is there a different way to approach this? We really want these on a structure to give us visibility, just don’t want them in inventory.
If you want these on a structure to show visibility, they have to be an inventory part. If you want to track the usage of them, they have to be in inventory. In order to be in inventory, they have to get into inventory in some fashion, but once you do that you either create a financial issue with material appearing from nowhere, or you create a supplier issue with material that you have already paid for. Usually these items if expensed also are not needed to be counted. So you recognize all of the issues then….same as we’ve experienced. Here is how we’ve handled this conundrum.
- All parts that are needed to be fitted will always appear on the BOM with the correct quantity.
- All parts that are fitted are always costed with the correct unit cost.
- Items that will be expensed fall into one of two categories, either vendor managed inventory that is replenished without a PO and just paid on an monthly invoice OR material that is purchased on demand through visual triggers and a purchase requisition to start the process, however, these are always purchased on No-Part POs, not Inventory POs.
- Items that are expensed are setup with a different Accounting Group on the inventory part so they are able to be separated financially.
- Items that are expensed are setup with a different Counting Flag on the inventory part so they don’t need to be counted.
- Items that are expensed are setup in a separate warehouse with separate default location designation so that everything in that warehouse is known to manufacturing and finance to be expensed at the point of arrival and doesn’t contribute to total inventory value.
- Items that are expensed have a daily migration job that sets their quantity on hand to 1000 so there are always plenty on hand to be ‘issued’ throughout the day wherever they might be required.
- The migration works against a project that is setup to see the increment of the expense items each day, but is know to not be a real increase in inventory value.
The outcome is that all of these items can be viewed from within their own warehouse even thought the Bay-Row-Tier-Bin might be right alongside inventory items that are not expensed.
The transactions to replenish look like this then:
So aside from you “don’t want to have these in inventory” - you do if you want the usage, and you don’t want to do a regular PO that creates a later receipt that goes to the wrong account.
I think you have the missing pieces to make this work, at least the way we’ve made it work.
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