Inventory

Inventory value in foreign prepayment scenarios

  • Reading time:7 mins read

I have this client who operates in very specific conditions: majority of their vendors are foreign companies which invoice them in a foreign currency (USD) and almost invariably ask for at least 50% prepayment.

NAV can handle prepayments and foreign currencies like a charm—the issue lies elsewhere: the fluctuations of currency exchange rate can easily cause real and tangible losses.

Even though prepayment invoice is fully closed by a prepayment applied against it, the actual costs of goods is not calculated from prepayment invoice, but from the actual invoice. And if there was difference between currency exchange rate at prepayment and invoicing dates, the inventory value reflects the actual invoiced value (instead of the prepaid value), there is currency exchange gain/loss which is fictitious, but taxable.

Thankfully, there are ways to avoid this.

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Warehouse Management quickie

  • Reading time:2 mins read

I’ve just got a call for help from a partner, about their customer who has decided to move from basic inventory management to full-scale warehouse management system. The question was how to post the opening balances for existing inventory quantities in flat locations to warehouse-managed ones.

I thought this might deserve a quick blog post, you can never know when someone else would want to do the same thing.

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Serial Numbers Conundrum

  • Reading time:6 mins read

A blog reader has asked me for help about an allegedly strange behavior of items with serial number tracking. They had a customer who had serial number tracking switched on for an item with FIFO costing method. Whenever they posted a sales transaction, they chose the serial number manually. Then they noticed a puzzling behavior.

No matter the specification of the serial number on the sales lines, Microsoft Dynamics NAV seemed to be closing the item entries according to FIFO method. This effectively allowed a serial number to be sold twice (or more). They called for help.

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Business case – do I eat it or?

  • Reading time:7 mins read

It’s a well known fact that IT projects fail every so often. Standish Group has been researching the success and failure factors of IT projects for a decade and a half, and they publish their results in their CHAOS report every two years or so. According to their 2006 report, only about 35% of projects can be categorized as successful, while 65% are declared unsuccessful. In this report, word unsuccessful can mean anything from exceeding time and/or budget (46% of projects) or failing altogether (19% of them). With such a huge proportion of projects going astray, maybe there was something wrong with these projects from the very beginning. Were the time and budget unrealistic? Were the project requirements, or even objectives, unrealistic? Maybe. Or maybe not. How can you tell?

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Inventory method UFO :-)

  • Reading time:2 mins read

Sorry for this series of totally irrelevant posts, by now you must be thinking that I am either out of ideas, or totally uninterested about the future of this blog. Neither is true, I am actually spending practically all of my time preparing for ten hours of content I have to deliver at a conference next week, and about which I hope I will post a blog in its own right.

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Peugeot – Engineered to be enjoyed (or A simple way a car dealership can profit from an ERP system?)

  • Reading time:5 mins read

About six months ago, when I was buying a car, a friend of mine, in a typical The Good, the Bad and the Ugly fashion, told me that there were two kinds of cars: good cars, and French cars. I bought a French car. I bought a Peugeot 407 SW (Peugeot says their cars are engineered to be enjoyed) and although I could do so, I am not going to make this a post about what went wrong with this car already so far. This is going to be a post about how the simplest of the features of an ERP system can influence customer (dis)satisfaction, and create long term decisions for, or against a car vendor. Also, not typical for me, I am speaking from the shoes of a customer, rather than consultant, this time. Quite a change for me.

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Not-so-elementary costing: The Change

  • Reading time:5 mins read

They say the only constant is change. I’d say that the only other constant is error. We humans tend to err. Give a repeatable task to a human, and they’ll mess it up every once in a while. Some call it the human factor.

One of the many repeatable tasks in Microsoft Dynamics NAV is setting up items. If you remember my rant about mandatory fields, and how I said they were baaad, there might be an even more baaad kind of fields: the default value fields. Because the system simply inserts a value into these fields without asking for your say, and if anything is easy, it’s only so easy to overlook these. Yep, you have a chance to voice your oppinion on these, but having got to hurry for a cup of coffe with Mary from accounting, admit it, you’re gonna leave that default FIFO costing method for an item every once in a while, even though it should really have been Average. Then you’ll start posting. Then your phone rings and starts screaming at you about a moron who screwed up items again.

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Purchasing Services: Inventory Value Zero

  • Reading time:4 mins read

I’ve stumbled recently upon a support request, where a partner asked if there was a possibility to register purchases of services in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. When it comes to selling services, such as consulting, or repairs, NAV is your true friend, because you can use Resources to register sales against them. However, purchase documents don’t offer a possibility of purchasing resources, so you are left to some workarounds.

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