Hi
Can you close a Job which is make to order, before the job has been shipped?
Im asking because i have been told that it can’t be done. I dont see why you shouldnt be able to do that.
Yes, you can Complete and Close a MTO job prior to shipment… BUT (and this is a pretty big BUT)
- all the costs on that job now have nowhere to go and will end up in Manufacturing Variance; and 2. the sales order itself is now hanging out there with nothing to ship (and no revenue to capture).
You’ll need to develop processes to take care of these loose ends or your finance people will come after you with pitchforks.
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Hey Ernie
Thank you for the respons!
Out of curiosity, are the processes to take care of issue 1. and 2. from above, difficult to setup?
Is it something which requires hours of work?
You’d be better make making the job to stock and shipping from stock.
There is no single correct answer to that question, and regardless of the answer several different groups of people will have a say (Finance, Sales, Production, and Materials at least).
SOME of the questions to be answered are (in no particular order): Why are we closing the job? Does the customer still want these parts? Can we salvage any materials back to stock? How do we want to account for the costs? Will cancelling this sale reduce someone’s commission?
There are ALWAYS one-off things that happen, and when they do it’s a matter of figuring out the best (or least bad) way of documenting it. If this is something that happens with distressing regularity, then quite probably there are other processes that need some work.
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This is how we are currently closing our jobs. I recieved a question today about if it could be done from MTO - hence my questions earlier 
It seems like it’s the best way so far.
That makes more sense.
I think it’s mostly about timing. Epicor is assuming that an MTO job is going to be shipped out as soon as it’s done. There’s no reason to hold it (They can be very simplistic in their assumptions). So if you ship it as soon as the job is done, That should be before you close the job.
If you are making the job and holding the inventory, they would say it doesn’t need a link to the job.
Another possible solution for you to go down is the planning contract route. You can put the orders on a planning contract and the job can be made to put the inventory in to the planning contract bin instead of general inventory. Then you have a link to the sales order that isn’t so rigid. You receive the job to inventory, but it’s specifically allocated to that planning contract to link to the order. Sounds like that could be a good compromise for your situation.
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In our case, we rarely ship the same day as we finish a job.
That sounds quite interesting, i will definately have a look into that.
Thanks!
We had the same question. The solution we found was to do move the WIP to our warehouse and then do “job receipt to inventory” which will then transfer the stock to finished goods, and COGS for finance. Once the job receipt to inventory is done you can close the job.
If you run MRP, you will want to COMPLETE the job in production and have finance CLOSE the job after it ships.
Completing the job should remove if from the production schedule.
Closing the job without shipping a MTO while running MRP will create additional jobs.