16 Nov Ask the Expert – Consignment Inventory
Ask the Expert – Manufacturing and QuickBooks
Q – I have purchased the QuickBooks Premier – Manufacturing and Wholesale Edition. We are looking for information on how to track the various WIP of our product. Can you help?
A – The feature you will want to use is inventory assembly, which requires QuickBooks Premier or Enterprise Solutions, version 2003 and higher. This functionality is included in the Manufacturing and Wholesale Edition, as well as the other industry specific versions. This feature is more effective than the “group” feature available in the other products due to the quantity and cost tracking.
Inventory assembly will permit “building” new items from existing inventory items. The associated cost of the previous item is “rolled” into the cost of the new item. The advantage of this process in your case is that you can create various “sub-assembly items.” Inventory can be purchased as raw material inventory. The raw materials can be “converted” by using the build assembly feature in QuickBooks to create the WIP inventory items. As the work in process is completed, the WIP inventory items can then be used to “build” the final product. At any given time, this will preserve the quantity and cost of the products in each “phase” of your manufacturing process.
TIP: This feature requires that all components of the inventory assembly item are either inventory parts or inventory assembly parts. No other type can be included.
List Limits Expanded
For most QuickBooks users, the list limit for the QuickBooks Pro and Premier products of 14,500 is sufficient. For some, however, that is not the case. We have been seeing increased list size for a variety of reasons. One of the most common is the increased number of customers as the result of web site sales. For version 6 and prior, the list limit was doubled for the Enterprise Solutions Product. New with version 7, the Enterprise Solutions limit has been removed.