Since we’ve upgraded to E10, if we add a new part & want to make it avg. costed we have to also check quantity bearing. If we don’t when we save the part it switches it to Std cost (which is our default). We then have to go back to the part & change to avg. check quantity bearing & check non-stock item. In prior versions we were able to have avg. costed parts that were not quantity bearing. This is fine, except now if we have an open purchase order & we want to change a due date, we’ve getting a message that a part can’t be “quantity bearing” and also be classified as “other”. These are shop consumables that we don’t track inventory on, however, all purchased items are avg. costed. Are we not understanding this correctly?
Not 100% sure you are using the costing correctly here. If the cost never is in inventory, then the cost method never matters.
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To expand on what Jason is saying, average cost is only calculated when items go into inventory. If they are non-quantity bearing, they cannot go into inventory and the average cost will not actually calculate an average.
That was my first thought also, but our dilemma then becomes if we make it is “standard cost”. If it is serviced it is “avg costed”. If we buy it, it is “avg costed”. This has been this way since we first went live in Epicor 3 years ago. **But only since Version 10, is it changing our costing method to standard if it isn’t quantity bearing. **
Also if these parts get set up as standard & they are for a sales order, they will go out the door at zero cost, because they won’t have a standard.
We also have a nice little report we run daily that tells us what parts are “standard costed”, but have no standard cost yet. We then just put them on a list & the parts get cost rolled daily. This eliminates having to write down every part that needs to be cost rolled. We can sometimes have an order that has over 100 parts on it. That’s a lot of numbers to write down.
Now we’ve started noticing purchased parts showing up on this report. We could filter our report to only look at manufactured parts, but then we would lose sight of parts that should be avg. costed for sales order purposes.
Sounds like you want LAST cost. This will update everytime you do a receipt.
EDIT:
LAST cost and AVG cost are the same when prior QOH is zero.
LAST COST = Received Cost
AVG COST = ((Received Cost x Rcvd Qty) + (Prior cost x Prior QOH)) / (Rcvd Qty + Prior QOH)
= ((Received Cost x Rcvd Qty) + (Prior cost x 0)) / (Rcvd Qty + 0)
= Received Cost x Rcvd Qty / Rcvd Qty
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I also just tried changing a part to LAST cost without the quantity bearing checked and again on the save it changed it to “Standard”.
I’m pretty sure both Last and Average cost use received into inventory as the trigger to change. Non-qty bearing parts don’t get received into inventory, so there will be no trigger to change it.
FWIW, that’s one of the reasons that we went to everything for a job coming into planning contract bins instead of being purchased directly to the job. If it was purchased directly to the job, the costing information wasn’t updated.
An odd thing I’ve found, is that making a part non-Qty Bearing changes the cost method to STD.
After saving (as Non- QB, and STD costing), changing it back to Qty Bearing, does not change the cost method back to AVG. It stays STD (but can be manually changed)
BTW - Our default cost method is AVG.
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How would the system know if you wanted it change or not? All methods of costing are allowed for qty-bearing parts. There is no way for the system to know if you want it changed or not.
Going the other way, average and last are not allowed, so it makes sense to change it for you.
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As Jason mentioned, the purpose of these fields are for inventory valuation only. If it doesn’t affect inventory, then it won’t (and shouldn’t) update these fields.
I think what people want to see is purchase history (average/last/quantities by supplier) and Purchase Advisor is a better tool for this. One could also add a tab to Part Tracker to duplicate the same information there.
Re-purposing fields to do what I think they should do gets me into all kinds of trouble…every time.
Mark W.
if you go to the site tab on the part master you can set average as the cost method and uncheck the qty bearing field and save. The “default site parameters” on the part master detail tab remain unchanged. I haven’t flowed this through transitionally - i’ll leave you try that 
- but in principle it looks like this will do what you want.
If this works transaction wise the practical application would be to create a template part configured this way and create any parts as a duplicate of this template.
we are also Avg cost
and the way i set up parts is if they are on a BOM and or Sales order it is Quantity bearing and we will manage the inventory.
if the part is not on a BOM or sales order, it is captured in our Overhead and it is non-quantity bearing.
but have you tried to change a part to avg. cost & leave the quantity bearing unchecked? Does it update to standard on you automatically?
Gloria, the Epicor logic won’t let you have a non-quantity-bearing part with average cost… simply because the average cost of that part will ALWAYS be zero if it is non-quantity-bearing. I understand that in earlier versions it may have been possible, but now it is not.
The reason it reverts to Standard is that you can enter a cost for the part in Cost Adjustment, and that is the cost that will be used when the part is rolled up in the BOM of a higher-level standard-costed item. If your accounting folks are insisting that “all purchased parts MUST be average costed”, then tell them that the average cost of a non-quantity-bearing part will ALWAYS be zero. If that’s what they want, they still can’t show the part as average costed, but you can set the standard cost to zero and you’ll have the same result.
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I understand that, but the only problem we’re running into is that we have this nifty zero standard cost report that runs & gives us all parts set up as “standard” that don’t have a standard cost yet (need to be cost rolled) This simply saves our engineers from writing down all these new parts on a daily basis for the cost roll to be done. Now we are getting a lot of extra parts showing up that don’t need to be cost rolled as they are just non-inventoried items (office supplies, gen. maint. Items etc) that we buy. I guess we could change our report to only look for “mfg” parts and not “purchased” parts, but then our issue is this report also allows me to catch “purchased parts” that get set up as “standard” in error & get fixed before they are received in at zero cost. If we allow these non-inventoried parts to just be “standard” I won’t see it until it hits my WIP reconciliation. Any suggestions besides make sure our parts are set up properly every time.
Thanks,
Gloria
LAST cost is just AVG cost with the assumption that the prior QOH is zero.
you could just make sure the GL control on the part class is mapped to an expense account for all the non-quantity bearing parts and make sure they all have that part class on the part, and also map the PPV to that same account. then it doesnt really matter if the STD cost is 0. all the dollars will be captured in the expense account.
Can put these nuisance parts in the same part class? Then filter your report by part class?
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Could you have that report just filter out any part where QtyBearing=FALSE?
I’m going to have our development guy just filter it to mfg parts vs. purchased parts & that should weed out these items. The reason being if they have to be standard if not qty. bearing then they would still show up on the report. But by adding the filter of “mfg parts” only it would just bypass any “purchased” parts.