How to Include Employee Costs in BOMs

May 6, 2016 at 3:02 PMThomas Riemann

Hello everyone. Welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog. As most of you know, My name is Tom and I am the trainer/support tech here at NumberCruncher. If you need to learn how to do something in the All Order's software, I'm your guy! Remember, if you are struggling with something in the All Order's software, please give us a call @ 866-278-6243. We can set up a training session with you and your company remotely. So make sure you build up those questions and give us a call to set up your session today! That's not what brings me to the blog today. What I would like to talk about today is something that customers ask about all the time, "How do I include employee Costs in BOM's." So sit back and enjoy the read!

Our first step is to create an item that we can put into a BOM. We're going to create a new item called "Labor" (or whatever you would like). This item should either be a non-inventory part, service or other charge group. If you are creating this item in QuickBooks, check the "This service is performed by a Sub-contractor, owner or partner." Next, go to the purchasing tab, enter the cost. The cost should estimate the hourly wages and benefits. Of course, we're going to need to select an income account and an expense account. For income, you can select any of them. For the expense account, create a new account Called "Salaries Applies to Finished Goods". Save and close this item.

Now it is time to include this newly created item in the appropriate Bill of Materials. Go to a finished good item and edit the BOM's. Simply add this item to the component lists. Save and close. Now we can start using this finished good on a work order that will include this new Labor Item's cost.

When you finish a production, the labor cost will be deducted from Salaries Applied to Finished Goods expense and included in the cost of your finished product. Now if the salaries account is greater than the Salaries Applied to Finished Goods, this means that a) you have processed payroll but have not yet finished the product or b) the Cost amount on the item is too low. If the Salaries account is less than the Salaries Applied to Finished Goods this means that either a) you have finished product but have not yet processed payroll or b) the "Cost" amount on the item is too high.

Well, I hope this has cleared any confusion you might have with creating Employee Costs in BOM's. If you still have some question's, place a comment below, and I will answer your question directly. You can also send us an email Support. It's Friday! Take some time to yourself this weekend and get ready for Monday! Enjoy!

 

TOM

All Order's Add ons

April 8, 2016 at 3:18 PMThomas Riemann

Welcome back to the NumberCruncher blog! I hope everyone is have a great week! Today I would like to talk about an add on to the All Order's software called All Order Mobile. All Order's mobile extends inventory management into your warehouse. This will allow you to increase your efficiency in the warehouse by decreasing mistakes made. All Orders Mobile by NumberCruncher extends inventory management into your warehouse and lets you take full advantage of barcode label printing within All Orders. To me, this add on really makes our inventory system the best inventory software on the market. Just a little bit of background on myself. I use to manage a warehouse. When I was in that field, we didn't have any bar code scanning or a real time inventory management system like All Orders. Which made my job much more difficult. Adding bar coding to your company will save a lot of headaches going forward. Imagine doing your inventory count's on a hand held device, scanning instead of physically counting. I would of gave anything for this system! Now let's talk about All Orders Mobile.

All Orders Mobile by NumberCruncher will make your warehouse operations more efficient! All Orders Mobile is installed on Windows based devices. It can connect wirelessly to your All Orders database and download sales orders to be picked, purchase orders to be received and counts. Once a sales order is picked the picking information will be uploaded in real time back to the All Orders database an automatically create a Ship Doc. Similarly, once a purchase order is received through All Orders Mobile, the information will be uploaded to All Orders and a Reciever will automatically be created. Finally, All Orders Mobile will update your count in All Orders with new quantities.

  • Pick Sales Orders
  • Receive Purchase Orders
  • Perform Inventory Counts
  • Find Location/Bins of Inventory
  • Move Bins
  • Adjust Inventory
  • Transfer inventory.

Check out our Intro video on All Orders Mobile by clicking here. We also have more video tutorial's showing how to perform a Sales Order, Receiving a Purchase Order and performing an inventory count.

Well that is all for today! I hope everyone has a great weekend! Make sure to contact us if you have and Questions. support@numbercruncher.com or call us @ 866-278-6243.

How to return Item's from the Consignment.

February 29, 2016 at 3:36 PMThomas Riemann

Hello, and welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog! Hope all of you are doing well and you business is thriving! Today I would like to continue to talk about a feature in All Order's called Consignments. I left you guy's hanging last week and only show you how to ship those item's to the customer from the consignment. Today, I am going to tell you how to get some of those item's that didn't sell back in stock from the consignment screen.

So you have sent out those item's now it's time to get some of those back. You will want to create a brand new consignment. Enter the same customer you shipped those item's to. Before I had you enter in the QTY you wanted to ship to the customer in the Ship Doc column. This time you will update the QTY you would like to receive back into All Order's. You can do that by entering the QTY into the Return Column. Once you have entered the necessary qty to be returned, go ahead and go to Activities - Finalize. This will create received doc's for those item's. This process is very similar to what we did last week.

Well, that is all for today. I hope you guy's have a great week! Remember if you have any questions, head over to our website. As always you can always e-mail customer support at support@numbercruncher.com or call us (866) 278-6243.

 

 

Lot/Serial Numbers

January 29, 2016 at 9:20 AMThomas Riemann

Hello, and welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog! I hope you guy's enjoyed some of those articles about our fantastic program, All Orders. If you haven't checked those out yet and are still on the fence about making the switch to All Orders, make sure you scroll to the previous blog post!

For today's post, I will be addressing Lot/Serial #'s. Tracking Lot and Serial #'s allows you to specifically track the movement of a particular item within your inventory. A lot of companies in the food industry and electronics will use Lot and Serial #'s. Normally, you wouldn't be able to differentiate between an item that was purchased a year ago and an identical item that was purchased 2 days ago. That's why its important to assign your items with a Lot or Serial number, so you can effectively track that item's movement. Another great thing about Lot/Serial #'s is that it will allow you to also track expiration dates.

In order to enable Lot/Serial #'s in All Orders, proceed to the Item Editor and select the "other" tab. You will see a check box "This item has lots or serial numbers. Make sure that is checked to assign a lot number to it. If you already have some Lot or serial numbers for items, but they are not in All Orders, you can use our LotSerialNumber.xls import sheet to get them into the system. You can find all our import sheets by following this patch in your machine: C:\Program Files\NumberCruncher\All Orders\Import. These are some of the very basic's of the Lot/Serial # feature in All Orders. In future blog post's I will be diving deeper into some of the basic features in All Order's.

Well, that is all for today. I hope you guy's have a great weekend! Remember if you have any questions, head over to our website. As always you can always e-mail customer support at support@numbercruncher.com or call us (866) 278-6243.

How to Perform a Bin Move

December 31, 2015 at 9:04 AMThomas Riemann

 

Hello! I hope you and your family had a great holiday! I know I enjoyed my first Florida Christmas! It was great to go to the beach on Christmas day! Anyway, back to things at hand. Last week we talked the basics about bins. Today, I would like to address how to perform a new "Bin Move". A bin move is a great feature and I find a lot of our clients use this frequently. 

If you need to transfer qty from bin to bin, you can use our newest feature called a Bin move. You can start a new bin move from the Warehouse menu – New Bin Move. This will prompted the bin transfer screen. Enter the location and the date of the transfer. There are 2 ways to move your bin quantities, you can move one item at a time or Move an entire bin. To move one item at a time select select that option. This selection will allow you to move a specific item and quantity. Select the bin from and the bin to and select one item, lot/serial #’s and enter the qty to transfer. One note to make, when you select your from bin, the total quantity in the bin (of all items) is listed.

Once you have selected the item, the total quantity for that item in that bin is listed. You can use that to determine the qty that you will transfer. Click add and your entry will be listed below. Repeat the steps for multiple items. The second way is to Move an Entire bin, you can do this by selecting the Move entire bin option. This will move all items and quantities from on bin to another. Select the bin you will transfer from and the bin you will transfer to. The total inventory in that bin will be selected, Click add and it will list all of the items located in that bin.

You can delete the line items that you do not want to transfer by clicking the red X on the line item.

Lastly, you can click Create Transfers and a new Quantity Adjustment screen will open. Remember no quantity is adjusted, you are just moving one bin to another.

In my years of being a Warehouse Supervisor, we had over 200 bins. The inventory warehouse software that we were using at the time did not have a feature like All Orders does. This feature would have made life a lot easier for me. Remember if you have any questions or concern's the NumberCruncher team is here for you. Please give our customer support line a call - (866) 278-6243. You can send us an email also - support@numbercruncher.com. Have a great New Year!! Here's to 2016! Best of luck!




Tom

Bins

December 24, 2015 at 8:48 AMThomas Riemann

 

Hey guy's! Welcome to the NumberCruncher Blog, Thursday Edition! Firstly, Happy Holidays from NumberCruncher team! We hope you and your employees have a great holiday weekend and spend some quality time with your families! Now, in my past 2 blogs we focused on Locations. Now we are going to focus on features within the locations, Bins.

Within the all orders program, we have a unique feature called Bins. This allows you to create a location within locations, allowing you to easily pinpoint the location of the item. If you have a huge warehouse with multiple aisles of product, this would be a key feature for you. A bin does not have to be a physical bin. A bin can be any place of storage, from an actual bin to a shelf or a crate.

For each item that is a Part or an Assembly you can specify a default bin.

When you add items to inventory (Receiving Purchase orders, completing a Work Order) the qty will automatically go into the designated bin. If you leave this area blank, it will go into the default bin. You can change which bin an item is either added to or pulled from on any transaction. You can also split qty between multiple bins in the same location. From the line item of a transaction, click details icon then click bins. Click in any column to enter in the desired bin, and then enter the quantity.

On a transaction where the qty is being decreased aka ship doc and you are not sure which bin the product is on you can click “get available” that will bring up a dialog box.

The bin feature is very useful for your warehouse staff, so make sure you take advantage of the easy to use feature within All Orders. Well, I hope you have learned something from this blog post and again I hope your company can run a little bit smoother. As I always mention, make sure you check out all our support tutorials. Remember if you have any questions or concern's the NumberCruncher is here for you. Please give our customer support line a call - (866) 278-6243. You can send us an email also - support@numbercruncher.com. Hope everyone has a safe and wonderful holiday!

Lot Number Tracking

June 13, 2012 at 6:06 PMIan Benoliel

 

What is a lot number?

A lot number is an identification number assigned to a particular quantity, batch or lot of a product from a single manufacturer. Lot numbers can typically be found on the outside of packaging.

A product will typically have an identifier often referred to as an SKU (stock keeping unit). For example a case of tomato sauce may have an SKU of SCS-123. In addition to the SKU, the case will have a lot number which may be different on each case. For example cases purchased in December may have a different lot number than those purchase in January but the SKU will be the same. A lot number may also be a date code representing the expiration of the product.

Why should my business track lot numbers

Lot numbers enable the manufacturer to trace a product back through the production process to the source of the raw materials used in the finished product. In our example of tomato sauce, the lot number on the cases allow the manufacturer to determine which tomatoes where used and from which supplier. So in the case where a certain batch of tomatoes may have been contaminated, the manufacturer can recall only the lot numbers affected instead of a total recall.

For food and beverage manufacturers, electronic traceability will become an industry requirement. On July 31, 2009, the House passed the Food Safety Enhancement Act, which has been touted as the most far reaching reform to food safety legislation in 50 years. The legislation outlines the requirements for all companies who produce, manufacture, process, pack, transport, or hold food to maintain full pedigree of product information and electronic traceability records. On Oct. 5, 2009, 55 food-service manufacturers, distributors, and operators launched the Foodservice GS1 Standards Initiative outlining the adoption of a common timeline for implementation of GS1 global standards for company identification, item identification, and product description.

Electronic record keeping is a central element of the BioTerrorism Act and all food companies regardless of size must comply with regulatory chain of custody conditions. Among other things, in the event of a recall, it mandates that a company be able to provide a complete chain-of-custody of a tainted product within four hours or face fines and penalties. This rules out the use of paper records.

How can All Orders by NumberCruncher help track lot numbers?

Technology exists to ease the regulatory burden. These solutions include electronic records handling to help streamline the handling of bills of material and work orders, as well as technology such as barcodes and labels for lot traceability and expiration dates. But this technology has typically been out of reach for the small manufacturer. However All Orders by NumberCruncher provides sophisticated yet cost effective means to track lot numbers through the supply chain to the consumer and its integrated with QuickBooks.

Bill of material

A bill of material (BOM) is a list of the raw materials, sub-assemblies, intermediate assemblies, subcomponents, components, parts, and the quantities of each needed to manufacture the final product. It may be used for communication between manufacturing partners or confined to a single manufacturing plant.

A BOM can define products as they are designed (an engineering bill of materials), as they are ordered (a sales bill of materials), as they are built (a manufacturing bill of materials), or as they are maintained (a service bill of materials). The different types of BOMs depend on the business need and use for which they are intended.

An electronic BOM provides greater control over production costs. The ease in creating and editing an electronic BOM helps in maintaining product consistency and understanding product yield—the actual vs. expected product output.

In process industries, such as food manufacturing, the BOM is also known as the formula, recipe, or ingredients lists. Using BOMs ensures recipes are adhered to during production. In addition to the ingredients and yields, the BOM has production instructions and routing steps, including one that can be called quality control. You wouldn’t believe how many small companies keep their formulas and production notes on paper in a file cabinet (or in the owner’s head). Paper, or even basic Excel spreadsheet systems don’t allow companies to easily update and instantly communicate changes throughout the entire organization.

Small food manufacturers need vital inventory and order management features to effectively track inventory quantities, production, and customer orders. All Orders by NumberCruncher for has the necessary tools that QuickBooks Inventory for manufacturing and manufacturers does not have. From bill of materials for recipes to tracking expiration dates, these Small food manufacturers have the same compliance and operational requirements as larger companies. They need much, but not all, of the functional technology solutions [that are available to larger companies]. Too often this type of BOM functionality is found in costly software and hardware solutions.

Work Orders

Paper work orders do not allow production data to be shared throughout a central database. Quality processes cannot be effectively documented and saved to create standard operating procedures critical to consistent food production. The ability to save and attach the batch and lot number being manufactured ensures quality processes.

The electronic work order is used to create finished product. Each step in the work order is completed before the work order can be finalized. Too often lower-cost technology solutions lack the needed custom fields required per work order that allow the quality control checklist to be integrated with all other functions, and retained in the same database as order and inventory information.

Without the work order, the impact on quality will be significant, because the internal quality metrics cannot be documented. The work order is the internal document that manages production of a specific BOM for a specified quantity. The work order can track yields of raw materials and reworks.

Bar Codes

Just as they use clipboards to keep track of inventory levels, many small food manufacturers use a grease board, dry erase board, or a spiral notebook to track orders from suppliers, inventory, location transfers, customer orders, shipping information, work order picking, and inventory counts and adjustments. All of these can be done via mobile bar code scanning, but until now, many small food manufacturers have found this critical technology inaccessible because they were priced out of these solutions.

Using bar codes for ingredients ensures that the correct ingredients are picked and overall production efficiency increases. The level of efficiency and reduction of errors decreases by an average of 10 percent.

Lot numbers and Expiry

Expired or soon-to-be-expired raw material can be identified and made unavailable for use with many systems. The ability to track the lot and expiry for both finished goods and raw materials is essential, and lots must have customizable fields that can be used to characterize a specific lot (for consistency, acid level, and other metrics). Having this information on the lot level can vastly improve quality. For example, knowing the consistency specific lot may require production to add more or less water to the batch.

 

Posted in:

Tags: ,