Cost Statistics Not Updating

In the screen please click the ellipsis button (...) followed by clicking the ‘Update Cost’ button which will change the pending cost to the current cost. 

Hello,

Update Cost is only going to work for Standard Cost items for which a new Pending Standard Cost has been entered.  Update Cost will not change anything for items with Average Cost valuation method.

The Average Cost for an item that has zero on hand is $0. The Average Cost for an item that has less than zero on hand is also $0: this is like saying, “we sold more than we have; we have to buy more items to fulfill this order, therefore we don’t know the cost yet because *we have not bought them yet*”. Nothing on hand means $0, 0 quantity in the Inventory Asset account and therefore, $0 Average cost. That’s why your system will begin substituting ‘last cost’ as an estimate -- the real average cost at that moment is $0. When the items are ordered, received, and shipped, (Qty on hand no longer negative) they will deduct from inventory and post to COGS using the real cost from average cost on the recent purchases.

Last Cost is largely controlled by the Vendor Price Update Setting found on Pricing tab of AP Preferences screen. Set it to On PO Entry or On AP Bill Release, and Vendor prices will automatically update both the Vendors tab of Stock Items, and the Last Cost field on Cost/Price tab of Stock Items every time an item is purchased:

Last Cost is editable - Last Cost can also be loaded with an import, or by typing in the latest price (as you noticed, when Vendor Price Update is not used, Last costs that were imported or manually entered during migration can become outdated.

I hope this helps you.

Laura

Hi ​@Laura02 ,

Thanks for the response.  Unfortunately it doesn’t quite solve the issues.

Update Cost - I figured that was the case, but I brought it up more to say I’ve ran all the updates on everything.

Average Cost - Several issues here for us still.  It’s not just items with negative QTY where this isn’t populating, but it’s all items.  It might make sense on an aggregate level for the “Stock Item” because all of our Warehouses are separately valued (because we have multiple companies).

The other part on average cost is that, even if negative, it still has a value. For example, if we are negative 10 on an item that had the last cost of $5, our Inventory Report and GL would reflect $50.  Do you know have any reports that lists the actual unit cost of the inventory?  Our Historical Inventory Valuation when set to a single period shows the quantity and the total cost, but not the actual unit cost.  Due to how that report gets generated, it’s impossible to do any analysis on it, to say compare average cost to recent sales prices or purchase prices.

Here is an item that we have on hand and has never been negative.  It’s only showing a last cost of $87.55 - which is it’s initial import value.  We’ve had purchases/sales since then and it doesn’t show an average or min cost.  Looking it up on the Valuation Report and the Transaction History, the item cost is $84.5, but this isn’t anywhere in the stats.

Stock Items Cost Stats:
 

Item Warehouse Details Cost Stats:

Vendor Price Update:

We’ve always had this set as “On PO Entry”, but it’s still not reacting to anything.  PO/Bill or otherwise.  I’ll try flipping it to “On AP Bill Release” in the test environment to see if that does anything.

Thanks again for the help and insight!

One other note on where this is coming up is we’re doing inventory counts now.  There are some items that were not negative quantity and we have active purchase/sales history, but a ‘unit cost’ is not pulling through into the report.  Some are, some aren’t, so I can’t determine what is the determining factor.

Here’s a case where all the item statistics are all $0, but when doing the adjustment, it’s pulling the correct cost for the item (there are 5 at a cost of $190, so $38 would be the correct average cost for that item).