I know this area was brought up before but it appears it hasn’t carried enough weight to have been addressed yet. The issue is the ability to “Add Another Line” on Production Orders. My reasoning behind this is best explained in the situation we have to deal with. Some of our clients are in the agricultural field. During harvest time, on any given day, certain quantities of multiple different crops (some times as many as 20) can be harvested, and the harvesting isn’t for any specific given customer. We use the Harvesting Date in the “Description” field on a Production Order which when reports are generated, allows the client to know how much of what crop was harvested on any given day. What we basically have to do to accomplish this is make print outs of every Production Order for that day for the client. Besides being a big waste of paper, it simply isn’t an expedient way to give the client the information they need.
By having everything harvested on any given day compiled or listed under one Production Order, it is much easier for the client to stay on top of their daily production (harvesting) by simply reviewing the overall production (harvesting) in a daily format.
The ability to record all those different harvested quantities on one Production Order would save considerable time and labor cost on our end. and allow us to better serve our clients.
You are misusing production orders, which are meant to produce one finished inventory item from other inventory items. The costs of the input items are thus transferred to the output item, along with other non-inventory costs.
What reports are you referring to? There are no production order reports.
Is this what you referred to as “reports?” Why are you printing out production orders to tell the client what they harvested? Surely the client told you or entered the production order themselves. I agree this is a lot of work to tell the client something they already know.
The suggestion you refer to for multiple output lines on a production order was for an entirely different purpose. The idea was to accommodate situations where a given set of input inventory items produced more than one output item, one being, in effect, a byproduct of producing the other, but still an item that would be stocked and sold as inventory.
Thanks for the quick response Tut. Let me see if I can explain more clearly. First I understand the true purpose of Productions Orders. In the type of example I used, there are factors that appear to leave us no other method to keep crop inventory’s updated properly. First, our agricultural clients track their inventory by weight and not pieces, ie: instead of 320 squash, it would be 550 Lbs of squash. As such we use the “Qty” field to record poundage and not pieces. When harvesting is taking place, a farmer may instruct his field hands to harvest a given square footage of field. The amount harvested is weighed up and that is the amount harvested.
The purpose of what I call a report to the farmer is something they can look at and get a clear picture of what their production is. This is used for a number of reasons. To compare those figures with previous years production from the same field. To allow the farmer to quickly calculate his/her break even point as far as setting a selling price. This often has to be done almost on at a moments notice. Recording by weight also gives the farmer indications of possible actual field problems not always seen initially by the naked eye. Those are just a couple of examples.
I know this use of Production Orders isn’t by any means normal or really appropriate but with the functionality and limitations of the Inventory element’s capability at present. We see no other solution except to handle Inventory Control for these clients in this way. We use the Production Order the way it was intended for our other clients the proper way it’s just in these few situations.
Inventory items can be defined with any unit of measure you want.
If production orders are how you record acquisition of harvested crops, how are you assigning their value? Presumably not as the sum of input inventory items seed, fertilizer, diesel fuel, etc. used over the growing season.
Believe it or not, we have that all calculated in the production cost which is of course reflected in the sales price. The actual (or as close as anyone can accurately get to the real production cost is entered in the Purchase Price on the Inventory Item form. I was raised and ran our own farm for several decades before I started our bookkeeping operation which provides me a rather insightful perspective on working with farmers and growers. I’ve designed a program that not only covers the items you mentioned but others most wouldn’t think of if they had never been involved in the agricultural industry.
Do you currently use the Goods Receipts tab, if yes, then instead of Production Orders, why not use Goods Receipts. You can set up one Goods Receipt per client for the day (or week) and each delivery can be added as a separate line item. Then to clear the Goods Receipt process a zero value Purchase Invoice would be transacted.
If you currently don’t use the Goods Receipts tab, then use a Purchase Invoice. Set up one Purchase Invoice per client for the day (or week) and each delivery can be added as a separate line item. The Purchase Invoice would only have quantity values entered - no monetary values.