I had mentioned before about “Item Groups”… this looks to be kinda the same thing as your Manufacturing Orders; I think?
Basically, if you sold a Group of items, give it a name, with the selected multiple Inventory Items under that group. If the group was entered into a Sales Quote and ultimately an Invoice, the Item in the Group would be listed on the Quote and/or Invoice and ultimately come out of the Inventory when an Invoice was created. Also; the Items would appear on a Quote or Invoice, if the Group was selected. Is this the idea of the “Manufacturing Orders”?
On another note; Do you have plans to have “Saved Filtered Reports” in the future?
I can see you hitting it big with this program. Great Job…
Manufacturing orders are to be used when you manufacture new inventory items and put those new manufactured items back to your inventory regardless whether you have buyers or not.
Some businesses manufacture “on order”, it means you have on inventory only required materials and only manufacture exact quantity of new items when customer orders them. You can still use manufacturing order to create these items and then sell them right away but an easier way of handling this will be implemented.
You will be able to create special type of item with bill of materials. Everytime you sell this item, Manager will automatically “manufacture” it based on attached bill of materials. It means, you won’t need to do manufacturing order. Just simple invoice. Or even simple receive money transaction (if it’s cash sale).
Is it anyway to give us more documents about this section as well as inventory? I try to understand how to use this feature. For example, I do journal entry for purchasing raw materials which are accounted as expenses, then I will have to do another journal entry moving raw materials into manufacturing? Can they all be done in one transaction splitting lines? Thank you in advance.
Why do you journal entries to purchase inventory? Manager has a lot of modules now and I can’t picture use case where journal entry would be appropriate for purchasing inventory:
If you purchase inventory and pay from business bank account, record the purchase under Bank accounts tab.
If you purchase inventory for business cash, record the purchase under Cash accounts tab.
If you purchase inventory using personal funds, record the purchase under Expense claims tab.
If you purchase inventory on credit, record the purchase under Purchase invoices tab.
As you see, Manager has it all covered regardless whether you pay cash or purchase on credit. There is really no need to use journal entry to record the purchase.
Regarding manufacturing, again, it’s a lot easier to use Manufacturing order tab to manufacture new inventory items than Journal entries tab.
By the end of this month, our documentation will be completely rewritten and up-to-date. It is heavily lagging behind features that have been added in past few months.
I thought it has to go through journal entries as it is raw materials and I fabricate the finished product. I use inventory to show stock which is asset for the business. I saw recently the module with manufacturing so obviously i will need to redo it from the beginning. I had an expense account as raw materials and I was doing it under there. So what you say is I do not need to use journal entry for everything as long as i use the options you say. I checked online for basic accounting but its confusing to find specific info. I also saw your comment on another post about inventory that is something that stays. My comprehension for inventory is that you can have stock that you will sell immediately or at some point in the future. Basically I want to show inventory which gives the business better financial position… unless i think of it wrong
Before Manufacturing orders were added, Journal entries tab was the only way to manufacture new inventory items but journal entries was really the “hardcode mode” as you had to know what to debit/credit and by how much. Manufacturing orders totally eliminate complexity of journal entries and will always make correct entries to general ledger.
When you purchase raw materials, you obviously want them set up as inventory items so they show on your balance sheet as “Inventory on hand” which will improve your “financial position”. To purchase raw materials is the same process as purchasing any inventory item. If you post purchase of raw materials to regular expense account, that will make your financial performance and financial position look worse.
So I would set up raw materials as inventory items. Then use Manufacturing orders tab to convert raw materials into finished goods (also inventory items). I would advise against using journal entries, the whole point of Manager is to have all modules so that journal entries are to be never used for ordinary transactions.
We don’t have modules for everything yet but the coverage is getting pretty good. If you find yourself to do journal entry, you can always ask on the forum to make sure there is really no better way.
Thank you Lubos. It is clear now with the new addition of the manufacturing. and yes it was hard to do it with journal entries. If not already done, may I suggest another module which is connected to manufacturing, at least in my case and maybe for many others. Just for assets where we can record in detail some assets such as designs or drawings which are included in the final product in case of manufacturing. i.e. I have some designs which I consider them assets which are printed on the final product as part of it. is it something that can be done? I think it will be useful for assets in general if its lets say an asset tracker which can feature all in one so it covers the majority of users needs? Regards
it is copyrighted images which are reproduced and attached to physical products. the physical product basically doesnt exist without the image or drawing or whatever. more like the reproduction of painting where you reproduce and sell copies of the same design. I think these are not in the intangible assets
With the manufacturing order screen would it be possible to enhance it so that I can create multiple finished inventory items from 1 source item rather than just the other way around?
Copyright or trademark is “intangible asset”. I wouldn’t add image copyright to the cost of finished goods because marginal cost of using the image on the product is zero. In other words, when creating manufacturing order, don’t worry about trademark and copyright in your bill of materials section.
No, that wouldn’t work. Manager needs to know the cost of the finished goods for inventory costing purposes. You need to create multiple manufacturing orders for each type of finished goods.
Can you add clone button in manufacturing order. I have many products that use same materials with a few different materials. This button will help me save a lot of time for selecting same material for all of my products. Thanks.
If you had “Multiple” Manufacturing Orders in production all at the same time, but a different “Rep” assigned to each MO, it would be nice to select from a Rep / Employee list to assign to each MO. This would also be a wonderful feature to add to Sales Quotes.
Keep up the good work.
Yes, the feature will be called “Bills of materials”, it will allow you to set up recipes for items you manufacture so you don’t have to specify them individually on manufacturing order.
Also, you will be able to directly sell items as defined by bills of materials so if you “manufacture on order”, Manager can automatically manufacture those items for you when you make a sale.