Standard Cost does not always equal current cost. Nor is standard cost meant to be used to quote off of- IMO. I haven’t seen anything stating this, but I just don’t see how standard cost can be meant to quote off of in all scenarios.
Covid has messed with a lot of us here I am sure. Prices fluctuate for raw materials more than ever, but not enough to want to use average cost (for us). Furthermore, our POs have such long lead times we can’t use last cost because the goods we are receiving today have already increased in price. The last cost is always lagging the current cost of the good.
We want to measure the variances based off of standard costs, but we would like to quote off a current cost of our raw materials. I could give several examples of how this happens and when it happens in every day business if you need and why none of the costing methods provided via Epicor can satisfy the need to measure variances and keep a current cost/future cost to quote off of.
Here is one example. A supplier tells us that the price is going up in 1 month. We don’t want to update the standard cost of a raw material because our inventory will rise and we don’t want to update it because we WANT to see variances based off the price set at the beginning of the year. On the other hand, we do want that future cost to be kept in the system so that we can quote off of it and see its effect on parent parts that have it in their bomb (done via a cost roll)! Now how does one do that?
I wish there were some notational fields that acted the same as standard cost, but you could keep your own values in there. That way we could still use the costing workbench to update them and they would have no impact on your inventory when they are updated. It would simply be a notational cost that you could use for whatever purpose you wanted to (i.e. Quoting).
Does anyone have any other ideas or has anyone ever solved this issue? Is standard cost meant to be used for quoting?
For the record, we want to keep using standard cost on all of our parts as the costing method, but keep up a notational cost as well- only for quoting purposes.
Have you thought about the other way around? Could your new fields keep track of your actual Standard Costs and then put the notational values in the Standard cost fields so Epicor will use those values? I know this messes things up a bit and you’d have to address any sort of reporting/recalculations elsewhere in the system…
It messes it all up, because we want variances to be based off standard costs. To use the standard cost fields for something else (quoting/notational) breaks their fit and function. Now all my variances are based off a future/quoting cost and not my standard that I want to measure them against.
We want to use standard costs to do what they are meant to do. When you start trying to use them for something else you lose their functionality.
That’s why I have concluded that they are not meant to quote off of/keep future/current costs.
Yes, agreed. It would mess things up usually, but only you could really determine that based on how the system is set up and used. With that idea negated, I’m not sure if there is any way that is simple.
We use our own costing/pricing algorithm inside the configurator - we have static values, adders, and some math to deal with changes in raw material pricing, including ‘future’ costs… Our cost accountants can just go into a UD table and change the adders for Stainless steel or whatever and the very next run of the configurator will pick it up. They do some magic eight-ball stuff and come up with a percentage and it gets added to all the costs in a quote. Works well for us and could for you if you use the configurator.
Otherwise, I’d be looking at a BPM to alter the numbers during the quoting phase. I’m sure there is something that runs through the part #s (or materials in our case) to get defaults and standard costs as they are added to the quote.
I would create a brand new Cost ID called QUOTE and I would use Epicor’s standard fields, and not make any custom UD Fields basically all Standard Fields would belong to QUOTE (this way all the roll-up and other functionality will work fine).
Then I would manually write a procedure to maintain QUOTE. Followed by a 2nd Phase for Automating it via lets say some Algorithm and a Scheduled Nightly Function.
I am more concerned with keeping up multiple cost site IDs. It would be nice to maintain just one and add notational fields that mimick standard cost as an enhancement idea.
However, given that those fields don’t exist I think the second cost site ID will suffice. I can add those fields in there as epinum boxes and then bind them to a FKV to get the standard cost from my quoting cost site ID
