Could you show ledger for those 6 inventory items or give me access in some way?
I’m working on a report that will do it with just single click.
That’s because recalculation is changing your cost of sales which feeds into retained earnings. However, upcoming report will be for the period. This is to ensure that you won’t recalculate past historical periods if they are already closed (and locked).
I keep getting this a lot. However the new inventory approach is storing unit costs in the database which means future versions won’t break your historical balances. The worst thing is that when you upgrade to newer version, your historical inventory cost of sales figures change because these costs were calculated by the software on demand. The new inventory approach is turning your cost of sales figures into data so you will get the same balances regardless of the version you are using. Previously cost of sales figures were calculated on demand by algorithm which means merely using different version could produce different cost of sales figures.
This was a big problem. Someone reports some bug in inventory costing. Now I’m facing hard choice. Fix the bug but then many businesses who didn’t even realize they were affected by the same bug have their cost of sales figures slightly changed. Or I can do nothing and keep telling people forever “it can’t be fixed because it’s too late”. Not to mention, there are some feature requests in ideas
category that can’t move forward until this is addressed for the same reason.
The transition has been extremely rough. I agree. The big issue is that the initial design I had in mind (periodic inventory) felt apart for businesses with complex inventory requirements. So I was going in wrong direction for a while and as a result everyone was suffering.
It will take some time to restore trust. I’m confident the trust will be restored in upcoming months when businesses see progress on topics in ideas
category.
The inventory is now perpetual (costs are now calculated separately on every sales, production order, inventory write-off etc). This is why you can see Cost of sales
for invoice and we will be able to do fancy things like showing projected gross profit margin on individual orders etc.
As for making it 100% automatic, I was considering this but it’s just not viable. You absolutely do not want your figures to be recalculated automatically if the software notices they are not correct. There needs to be manual trigger so that software doesn’t recalculate your cost of sales in closed periods.
You might say - we have Lock Date
to prevent this. Sure. But once in a while, lock date is sometime lifted. You would not expect your cost of sales to be recalculated for all your past periods just because you have removed Lock Date
for a few minutes.
The way I’m thinking about this is that when you are viewing financial statements such as balance sheet, Manager can tell you.
- You have 3 unreconciled bank accounts (Reconcile button)
- You have 8 inventory items with inaccurate cost of sales (Recalculate button).
- etc.
So recalculate button can be eventually so subtle, you just click it to get the yellow notice to go away. But it needs to be clicked. And if you did something you didn’t intend to do (e.g. clicking Recalculate
on historical balance sheet when lock date was lifted temporarily). You should be able to undo it using History
. If these things are 100% automatic, they can happen when you do not intend them to happen and there is no way to undo them because well, undoing them would immediately trigger correction. So that’s why it cannot be 100% automatic but we can make it so subtle that it will seem like automatic because you won’t be thinking about it.