We produce skincare products and we use the “inventory items” tab in manager to crosscheck our physical inventory.
We started using manager in 2019 and it was a long and slow integration as we were adjusting to the new system. Several time we had to do journal entries and write offs as we were reorganizing the stocks and getting the staff familiar with the counting procedure.
On the 15th of May we did a full stock count and did write offs and journal entries as needed to rectify the stock. Today a month later we realize the for one of the products (didn’t check others yet) there is a big discrepancy (600+ difference).
We checked all the movement from 15th of May until today and there is no issue there.
Is there any way to follow up and track potential changes that have led to this issue?
I know it could be a change in a delivery note, a write off, a journal entry, or a goods receipt note earlier that would change the all the summaries, but I know I have not amended any old entries.
It makes me a bit worried as a few weeks ago there were issues with the journal entries not counting properly and before that you were required to always put a inventory transfer from a non location to the location in question when making a journal entry. I don’t feel like I can 100% trust that some of the times we are having issues it’s due to something having changed in Manager and not necessarily a human error.
Most of the time I’m sure the error is human but I feel like I’m missing something. Does anyone have any advice on how I can easier track and find changes?
I wish there was a way to sort of “lock” in the stock and if you tried to remove or change something it would give a warning (as when you remove a customer that still has delivery notes, receipts, invoices etc).
Thank you for all the information, much appreciated!
The issue was indeed that a batch for one of the products had “insufficient quantity” as one of the oils used in the production ended up in the negative. The stock for that oil is still deducted and ends up in the negative but there are no finished goods registered until I added a journal entry for that particular raw material to get it to 0 (after use).
@lubos The reason is a lot of suppliers sell their oil per liter and our production uses grams to be more consistent. We sometimes do a production order to transfer the purchased liter oil into kg but it can be difficult if we don’t know the weight of the oil container or perhaps it’s a big purchase and we go for an average weight on each container.
So ideally there should of course never be a negative but with the oils it’s difficult to prevent (sometimes we will have more, sometimes less).
@WildTZ fair enough but if you don’t make these production orders to convert liters to kilograms, the full cost of production order using oil could have never been calculated properly.
This is one of the reasons for the change with production orders so it’s forcing users to enter all required transactions. And thus production order can allocate the correct cost to output items.
I understand. It makes sense. If I need to do a unit conversion the only way is to duplicate the inventory item and change the unit used and then use the production order to move it from liter to gram?
I have been reluctant to do this as it would really clog up our inventory item list. If there are any other ways please let me know.
Edit: As an example for Refined sunflower oil (gram) our unit code is “OIL-RSU”. For Refined sunflower oil (liter) our unit code is “Z-OIL-RSU”. I then do the purchase invoice and good receipt in “Z-OIL-RSU”, then proceed to weigh what we received and put in a production order using “Z-OIL-RSU” with the finished product being “OIL-RSU”.
You will need two inventory items, one for liters, one for grams. There is no other way around it. Manager cannot do any automatic conversions because as you said the ratio between liters and grams is variable and this variability is captured within production orders.
Not sure what you mean by cloging up your inventory item list.
Can I suggest, that you measure out a litre of the oil and weigh it, from 3 or 5 purchases.
Then average those results and use that average as a conversion factor in the production order, that way you can eliminate the impact of the container weight.
Alternatively, use that conversion factor at the time of entering the Purchase Invoice.
So if you purchase 200 L and the conversion factor is 1.1, then you enter 220 kilos or 220,000 grams, but noting the 200 L in the Description field. This would assist in eliminating duplicate Inventory Items.
When you do a physical count, if there is a notable variation with the “tab”, then you could re-calculate (fine tune) the conversion factor for future purchases.