How do companies purchase office supplies? Does any one use non-stock inventory to do it and if yes, how do you purchase a non-stock item? I believe the only way is to create an item card and after you do that, the behaviour appears to mirror that of any stock item — which is what we don’t want since how do you really deplete your stock of pens after you’ve bought it. In this case, what is the benefit of having non-stock items? I’ve suggested purchasing to an expense account - office supplies - but the difficulty with that is every time we order from a vendor, we have to type out the vendor catalog number and description (overwriting the description field) instead of selecting an item and there’s more room for human error. Thank you, Grace
Hi Grace This is a bit of a problem I have come across for a number of clients. You could use Charge Items and and make a mod to it so you don’t have to assign the charge item to an inventory item, this way the charge item can be posted against a G/L. Cheers Peter
Hi Grace I presume you are not running Attain 3.6? In this version as well as the item charges Peter refers to you have non-stock items (I do not remember them in 3.01). To quote the help file
quote:
When a nonstock item is entered on a sales line for the first time, the program uses the information contained in the Nonstock Item table to generate an item card, to add a record to the item vendor catalogueue, and to generate an item cross reference, (if the cross-reference information has been registered). When you create an item card in this manner, the program creates the item number according to the rules defined in the Nonstock Item Setup table.
Probably not much use if you are not running this version, if you could use it at all, but at least you know it is an area they have had a go at addressing.
We are running Attain version 3.10US version. We will never sell these “non-stock” items. It’s just office supplies we are purchasing. Item charges may work but how do you get no costs against those charges (I assume that all the costs would be recorded against the GL line)? Thanks, Grace
In my limited experience, clients usually handle this us G/L Accounts. They do a Navision purchase order for so many $$$ (or Euros, or whatever) of Office Supplies, etc.— then they generate the vendor’s order form outside Navision. You could also put the “non-stock” items into stock when you buy them, I suppose, and then take them out of stock when a department requisitions the item from the warehouse, supply room, etc. There are situations where you would want to keep track of items which you are not actually selling.
Whether using stock items or g/l code - you might try using order templates to prevent rekeying. You could either have a template order and copy that to a new order using copy document feature, or (I prefer) to have a requisition worksheet template. This can be set up once with all the supplier codes etc, then copied to a new batch, amended for that particular order and turned into a PO. Alternatively, if you can justify the overhead of using items, you can use the requisition worksheet as a shopping list that users can add to when they need something. A buyer can then review this periodically and convert to an order. If you use G/L codes, you can use the item cross reference field on the po line to record supplier codes - unfortunately the requisition worksheet does not have the cross reference field. Personally, I think the effort of setting up items (either using non-stock or direct) is worth it. Clearing stock out does not have to be a big overhead - either as they are used, or periodically using a Phys. inventory journal, or just let it build up and filter the item group from your stock valuations. regards,
Grace - you can create items, put those into a special Gen. Prod. Posting Group. This group is set up with no sales account (by this you will not be able to sell theese items); but you will be able to filter out items belonging to this group. The Item-table contains field 5409::“Inventory Value Zero”; the field is not visible on the standard item-card (don’t know why), so you have to modify form 30::Item Card. If you set this field=TRUE, the items will not have any value - no posting are made in G/L Entry. With this solution you will have the items “in stock”, but there is no value. And in case of a physical count you can filter out the special group(s). Some of my customers use this solution - and it works.