Variable Outside Service Costs

How are you getting variable outside service costs back to your production orders?

I am struggling to come up with a usable process for outside service/process management. We use several outside processes and depending on service, product mix, quantity, etc. they have different costs. We may use a quote from the vendor or base our cost on price lists. Acumatica does not seem equipped to deal with this scenario.

Please feel free to skip over my specific attempts, and share how you have managed to get varied outside process costs onto your production orders.

What I’m looking for, and the problems I am running into:

1. To enter planned cost and quantity needed onto a production order operation subcontract material
   1. Can’t set quantity needed and batch size when Subcontract Source is set to Purchase and Move - even when my outside service is traded in a different unit than my production is producing. E.g. I am making 100 pieces and need to outside process 150 pounds - the weight of 100 pieces.
   2. Can’t set unit cost when the production is Planned, but I can if I put the Detail On Hold after it has been Released, but then it doesn’t get rolled up into the Planned costs for the production.
   3. Unit cost set on the production has no effect on unit cost selected on the PO even when the PO is created directly from the production.
2. To produce a usable PO to the vendor using the planned cost as basis
   1. If we accept manually moving parts through the operation after receipt, the best method I’ve seen is to use a non-stock item with a $1 standard cost and you embed the real cost and quantity into the quantity needed field. E.g. I am making 100 pieces that weigh 150 pounds total, the cost is $0.50/pound, so I enter a quantity needed of 0.75. This will carry the total cost through the PO and back to the production but produces a PO that suggests I am buying and receiving 75 count at $1 each which confuses my purchaser, my vendor, and my receiver.
   2. There is mention in the help text of using stock items for outside service charge management but I haven’t been able to find any examples of people using that so I’m struggling to understand when it is wanted. It does help carry the cost from the PO back to the production when using the Purchase subcontract source without losing all quantity and unit information on the PO, but it prevents carrying the planned cost into the PO and feels like a misuse of stock items.
   3. The usability of the PO could be improved by including more helpful information in the material line description, e.g. If I change the material description to include ‘150 pounds at $0.50/pound’ - but a modified material description does not carry through to the generated PO either. 
3. To receive the PO, backflushing the cost of the PO to the linked production, and, ideally, moving the parts through the operation. 

I’ve found many threads petering out without real resolution on this topic, so I am hoping that some of the people who have participated in those threads have come to some workable solution. Some of those threads include: 

Some people from those threads who might have an answer to this question (sorry to at you!): ​@GJensen ​@travislawson ​@jdobish 
 

Thank you for reading.