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Defining a non-stock item

  • 12 February 2023
  • 3 replies
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J
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We are new to Acumatica and I am trying to get my head around whether certain items should be classified as stock or non-stock. 

What in my mind are stock items:

The main manufacturing area of the business involves manufacturing mechanical / electronic products - usually from a series of subassemblies, each subassembly having it’s own BOM. The components are stored in a stock room in bins. They will then be sold and leave the system when a sales order is shipped. 

What I’m not sure about:

  1. Another area of the business runs courses to train people in virtual production. For the purposes of running the courses, some specialist equipment is purchased (e.g. cameras, tripods, batteries, switchers, recorders etc). We want to know/track what equipment we have, (and most of these items would be purchased via a PO which goes through an approval process), but the items are used in house to deliver the hands on courses - rather then getting sold directly to customers/sitting in a warehouse.
  2. Similarly, another ‘service’ area of the business offers technicians to work on particular projects (or to go to trade shows / exhibitions) - often bringing equipment with them to deliver a particular project. Depending on the project, items of equipment will be purchased and then come back to the main office - and get stored somewhere - although these items are not sold to customers directly. 

The items in 1. and 2. above in my mind are non-stock items - but doing this would mean that we cannot track what equipment we have / where it is stored? Unless it is all added to an asset register - but what about the items that are not of sufficient value to warrant adding to an asset register?

I then wondered if we would be better off creating separate warehouses within the system for items relating to 1. and 2. above and somehow set the warehouses up so that although the items / their quantity can be tracked (i.e. they are treated as stock items), their value is not contributing to the stock on hand value? Not sure if that is possible. 

It’s a challenge to separate it all out!

Any thoughts or ideas would be very welcome. 

 

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Best answer by cwise52 12 February 2023, 20:03

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C
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Hi James,

 

You are correct in that Nonstock items are well, no stocked and offer no visibility after being purchased or consumed. If the asset is of enough value ($500) to track as asset that that would be a good place to do that and move it from location to location. Service items are easy, they are purely non-stock and used for billing services to a customer or purchasing. You can use no stock services for anything really from landscaping to training courses. 

The trickier one is an asset that does not qualify to be an actual asset. This would need to be a stock item. If you already own the asset. I would do a manual inventory receipt at zero cost. What is your costing method? I would track this in your main warehouse but create a location for Company assets. You can create other locations such as Trade Show or Customer to transfer these zero cost assets as they move in and out of your building.

You may also consider CRM. You can create your own task category for tracking things and tasks can be nested under other tasks. You could create a master task for each asset and use a custome task category such as Company asset. Then in that task you can create other tasks to track the current location of the asset.

 

Hope that helps.

Best Wishes on your Acumatica journey.

 

Chuck

J
Rank

Hi James,

 

You are correct in that Nonstock items are well, no stocked and offer no visibility after being purchased or consumed. If the asset is of enough value ($500) to track as asset that that would be a good place to do that and move it from location to location. Service items are easy, they are purely non-stock and used for billing services to a customer or purchasing. You can use no stock services for anything really from landscaping to training courses. 

The trickier one is an asset that does not qualify to be an actual asset. This would need to be a stock item. If you already own the asset. I would do a manual inventory receipt at zero cost. What is your costing method? I would track this in your main warehouse but create a location for Company assets. You can create other locations such as Trade Show or Customer to transfer these zero cost assets as they move in and out of your building.

You may also consider CRM. You can create your own task category for tracking things and tasks can be nested under other tasks. You could create a master task for each asset and use a custome task category such as Company asset. Then in that task you can create other tasks to track the current location of the asset.

 

Hope that helps.

Best Wishes on your Acumatica journey.

 

Chuck

Thanks Chuck. That’s very helpful. I think we will be using a FIFO costing method.

We just need to find a way of doing that for newly purchased non-stock items that we might want to track the quantity/location of - since our purchasing administrator would be adding these items to a PO, which would be approved by a manager, and the items would then be receipted when they arrive.

Such items currently account for about 1/3rd of our inventory, and using our old ERP system they all get removed from stock in an annual stock check, so that we can get a true value of our stock on hand. At which point we lose the ability to track the location/quantity of them anyway! This makes a perpetual inventory accounting method difficult, and messes up our ability to interpret the results of running MRP - because many of the items that the system thinks we need to purchase are non production related, one off items, that have been manually removed from stock during an annual stock take. 

The more I think about it, the more it seems easier for all of these non-stock items to be purchased as non-stock items (via a PO that gets approved), and individual departments to keep track of what they have (or what they have sent off site for various reasons) themselves - perhaps using tasks as you mentioned.

I apologise if I am not fully understanding how an ERP system works :) Hopefully I’ll get there in the end!

 

 

U
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Hi James

In addition to tasks/ activities, if you use the full Purchase requests and requisition process, then you can track the flow from request to issue, by department / workgroup for non-stock items.

Hope this makes sense.

/Uma

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