Does anyone know of a way to maintain manufacturing cost elements (i.e. use the functionality enabled when “Enable Mfg Cost Elements” is checked) in one scenario, while using the default job costing method in all other scenarios?
Essentially, we need to maintain the split-out cost elements if we manufacture a part to directly fulfill a material line on another job using a direct job-to-job demand link. We’ll use the cost elements to pass along labor cost from one job to a separate job that isn’t ready to engineer yet. But otherwise, if we issue a part from inventory, we want the cost of that part to be categorized as material cost only (even if that part has been previously manufactured on a make-to-stock job in the past).
We’ve checked with consultants and even tried using separate project groups so we could tie the product group to separate GL accounts. As far as we can tell, Mfg Cost Elements are an all-or-nothing commitment (at least at the company level). If anyone has any creative ideas for how to control when the split-out elements are/are not passed through to other jobs, I’d love to hear your ideas.
I haven’t tried this scenario. Please try updating the field JobHead.SplitMfgCostElements based on your condition using a BPM and see whether you can achieve it.
I like your idea. If you submit it to Epicor Ideas, I would certainly vote for it.
We don’t do job-to-job anymore, but I had set up our main workflow that way for about a year, I think. We had split elements then. (Is that the default?) When I told our controller we could do away with that, he jumped at the chance. But in testing, I realized it would hose my beautiful job-to-job scheme as it balled up the whole cost as material. Thankfully, we changed business practices at the same time and didn’t need the job-to-job anymore anyway.
Thanks for this suggestion, Arul - it’s working! The JobHead.SplitMfgCostElements field is the key.
In our case, we decided that where wasn’t adequate data for a BPM to decide when JobHead.SplitMfgCostElements should be true or false. We added a checkbox in Job Entry so that our personnel can set that field to false as needed. (We have “Enable Mfg Cost Elements” set to True in Company Configuration, so the JobHead field defaults to True.)
Here is our new process:
Continue entering the jobs to produce make-to-stock manufactured parts as normal (JobHead.SplitMfgCostElements = True). Cost for the parts received to inventory are split into labor, material, burden, etc. We’ll call this a “Make-to-Stock Job”.
When we’re ready to use the previously-manufactured inventory as material on another job, we want total cost for that inventoried part to be shown as material cost on the job that consumes it (we’ll call this a “Job-on-Project”, as it will be included on a project, and the costs will be analyzed as such). So, when entering the “Job-on-Project” that will consume the Make-to-Stock part from inventory, we manually change JobHead.SplitMfgCostElements to False. Any labor that is applied to this “Job-on-Project” will still be tracked as a labor cost, and so on. But, the cost of the material consumed on this job will all go into the job’s total material cost. (In other words, the cost elements of the Make-To-Stock Job will be totaled, and that total cost will apply to the Job-on-Project as material cost. No labor costs (etc.) will be added to the Project / Job as a result of consuming the Made-to-Stock item.)
Additional notes:
The above process only works that way if the manufactured material is issued to the job from inventory. If a part is manufactured as Make Direct for the Job-on-Project, then the cost elements of the make-direct manufactured part will carry through to the Job-on-Project and Project costs. So for make direct materials, changing SplitMfgCostElements to False on the job that consumes the materials will NOT cause the costs of the Make Direct material to roll up into the project’s manufacturing costs.
We looked briefly at whether you could cause the costs to roll up as material costs when he material is Make Direct, but didn’t find a solution. We tried setting the job used to manufacture the Make Direct material to SplitMfgCostElements = False (in addition to the job that consumes the material). That didn’t affect how the costs applied to the Job/Project. It wasn’t a big issue, so we didn’t pursue that question further.
Proceed with caution if you want to try this. There may be risks associated with making this field editable, or with something we haven’t discovered yet. We did review financials through this process and found that everything worked as expected (so far - we haven’t been doing this for very long). But we are being careful not to change the SplitMfgCostElements value later on (after materials have been issued, etc.) in case that could mess things up.
Ohhhhhhh! Now I get what @Arul was saying - it’s a field on JobHead, too! Glad you were tracking, because I sure missed that detail. Well that would have been nice to know a couple years ago. But I mean, of course, because I had noticed the existing jobs “remembered” the old setup when we switched the company flag.