I’ve searched through a lost of posts but I can’t quite find my exact situation; apologies if I just didn’t search hard enough.
We use MES/Data Collection on the shop floor and when ending a job some employees will use the “Report Quantity” selection from MES to enter the quantity of parts completed and then “End Activity”. Others go straight to “End Activity” and enter the completed quantity there. As I’m reviewing production detail reports before closing jobs, I noticed that there are some variances between the costs showing for Mfg Receipts and the total costs at the bottom of the report. Copy of report below:
When I calculate the difference between what is shown under Manufacturing Receipt Activity and the amount for the job in total, the result is that the last labor entry isn’t captured in the Mfg Receipt. I’ve looked at other jobs where those numbers are equal - leading me to wonder if reporting the quantity while ending activity and reporting quantity and then ending activity separately somehow post differently in terms of job cost? Also - we use Average costing which I should have mentioned already.
And if the complete job costs aren’t being reflected in the average cost of the part - how do I “fix” it?
It is chronological. If the labor end activity happened even 1 second after the receipt to finished goods it goes to manufacturing variance and not into stock.
I see they are both on the 24th, so I am assuming if you look at the details that will be the case.
You’re correct. So that means that for all of the jobs where our operators select “Report Quantity” and then “End Activity” - that time goes to the variance account. Overall that ends up going to COGS on our end but since that labor is going to variance it is not being reflected in the average part cost - correct?
When we were going through our implementation, our consultant actually instructed us to use Report Quantity and then End Activity. I’m guessing said consultant didn’t understand how the system calculated costs maybe?
We went years thinking if we added material to a job after it was complete it was in the job cost because we saw it in job tracker. I spent most of 2023 going after manufactures variance and learned a lot about timing of transactions that we did wrong.
I think of Report Quantity and start/end as two different ways to do the same thing and you would do one or the other to move quantities. Although there was someone here that used Report Quantity for periodic quantity updates while still clocked in to a job.
All of our methods are set to Auto Receive so reporting the quantity sends it straight to inventory…
I feel like this may be my year to really dig in on the costing aspect of Epicor. We already have some issues where operators forget to log in to a job and then do a quick log in and log out to report the quantity… I certainly don’t want to lose the cost of the labor that is actually tracked!
