We haven’t used jobs before so i am still learning. Most of our manufacturing is not well defined in terms of material requirements so we would like to track the material used but not pre-define it. I have setup the jobs with a generic material and we are purchasing to that. However it seems that once the job material qty has been purchased no further purchases are allowed.
Is there a way we can over order the job material?
Thanks for any suggestions or pointers
Brett
You can add material to the job as you go. We do that with paint right now. Just make the first step to order something adding the material line onto the job. Then the PO can be linked to that. It’s an extra step than just ordering it to inventory, but now you have some history and trace ability to be able to start getting better at defining things later.
Edit. more to add: Also while you can only link one PO (I think, I actually would have to double check that, you probably can link more that one PO to a material line 
You just won’t get a suggestion, it would be done manually) when buying directly to a job, if you are issuing from inventory you can issue as many times and whatever quantities (and whatever part number!) you want to a material line. We used to have a Misc Purch line, that things would get purchased to before our job were define. Everything for the whole job would get issued to that one line. It wasn’t pretty, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could do it.
Understand that per the MOM… the established BOM list is intended to project and advise (time-phase) as how to attend to satisfactory inventory balances at time of production need.
Issue to job if material is in the BOM is easy… but you can MISC-ISSUE any material to any job!
Or buy anything to any job
PO’s… buy to inventory, JOB, Sub-con, or other
Quite sure you understand the 4 types.
Buy to Inventory puts cost in the aligned Inv-acct, and as parts are issued to jobs or sold-direct costs move
Buy to job, dumps cost into the job directly!!!
So the question to you: In what manner do you want to manage inventory?
Having specific (needed) parts on the MOM (per BOM) eases the pain of manual efforts.
If the part or part-class has a Buyer-ID, and prime supplier on the SITES sheet… and Generate PO suggestions is checked, the suggested needs are in NEW PO SUGGS.
It was stated that you may over-buy materials.
Option 1) Generate a PO (for a real-part) as buy to job. Materail is received to JOB… all cost goes to WIP-MTL. Presume you only utilize 30% of the material. Transact the material to inventory from the job. Representative material job on JOB is reduced, showing more accurate cost.
Option 2) Since a PO line can be set per BUY TYPE… two lines on the PO.
Line 1 BUY to JOB
Line 2 Buy to inventory
Back onto this after a nice few weeks off 
Gotta love Xmas holidays.
We used to have a Misc Purch line, that things would get purchased to before our job were define. Everything for the whole job would get issued to that one line. It wasn’t pretty, and I wouldn’t recommend it, but you could do it.
This is pretty much the same problem and solution I am trying to resolve. Our jobs are far from defined but we want to start using jobs so I figure using a misc purchase line on the job is an option to get us started. I had been setting the qty/Parent on the job line to 1 but that seems to limit the purchasing to 1 PO. Did you have to use a large number for the Qty/Parent or is that another way?
Also if you can share any gotcha’s you found with this approach it would be appreciated.
Cheers
Brett
I would really recommend adding another line line to the job every time you need a PO. I know It seems like a lot of extra work, but if you want to get to eventually having structured jobs in the future (and you should) you should get used to having each item it’s own line. If you are going to ever start using dashboards or BAQ’s to look at information, it’s a lot easier to look at the Job tables than it is to try to sort out the part tran tables, and eventually you should be getting to where you at least have some sort of starting template for a job to start with so the amount of manual adds should reduce over time as you get better at estimating.
Buying to one misc purchased line was a mess and I’m glad we don’t do it anymore.
@bmanners Any thought to not purchasing the materials to job and just purchase to stock?
Purchasing to inventory is fine then issue to jobs as and when you consume them but try to ensure you have some defined naming conventions and units of measure to identify a particular material and that the persons responsible for creating the Part Numbers and Part Descriptions are abreast of the full list of materials and part numbers already created. Nothing worse than having several part numbers/descriptions for the same item.
For example 30mm Dia x 316 Stainless Steel could have a unit of measure of mm, m, feet, inches or each depending on if you normally buy and consume the whole length in a single job or if you cut pieces off and leave the remaining balance in inventory.