Looking for to understand a scenario where the costs received to inventory from a job are higher than the actual costs to date?
In the screen shot below from a Work In Process Report, the cost to inventory is $13144.63 which matches the MFG-STK transaction for that part record. However, the costs to date on the job are only $11127.10 resulting in a negative cost value in WIP?
No transactions have been reported against the job after the MFG-STK transaction occurred. The variance is only showing in labor and burden, not material or subcontract.
Additionally, this screenshot from a Production Detail Report for the job shows a total which matches the “To Date” value above of $11127.10 = $11385.74 total minus $258.65 for QA scrap adjustments.
What is the costing method that has been assigned to the part itself? If it is marked as Standard Cost, then this could be “as expected”…
In a standard cost system, you set the standard cost to one value, but the job accumulates all the costs based on what actually happened. If there is a difference, then that becomes a variance.
Example: i have a part with STANDARD cost of $10 each. I create a job to make 100 of those. the job accumulates the cost of the material and labor, but you only issue $900 of mtl/labor (enough to make only 90 parts)… but in the end, you receive to stock 120 parts ($1200) into stock. How did you get 120 parts out of 90 materials? Data Entry? “found” parts? That is what the Variance helps you discover.
We use Lot Average costing for all of our parts. I did double check this part just to be sure. I agree with your example in a standard costing environment but have never seen this behavior before in a lot avg environment.
well, lot control can also do some weird things… the cost of the lot is captured at the time the receipt happened… but if after you receive the parts, you return material from the job, then the cost of the job goes down. You would need to look at all the transactions and when they happened.
This particular part has two material components. I verified that all material transactions for those components with respect to this job occurred prior to the top level MFG-STK transaction. As a side note, no material returns were process for this job, they were all positive material transactions being issued at the beginning of the job. Additionally, the costs left in WIP are labor and burden. Although we do have “Enable Mfg Cost Elements” turned on, I don’t see any transactions in the lower level components that are cause for concern.
The only transactions that occurred after the job to stock receipt were a disposition of parts in inspection pending to scrap. That $258.65 is accounted for in the QA Adjustment noted in the Production Detail Report.
Andrew, try running the Start Date of the WIP report back a year or two. Does this clean it up. Just wondering if someone entered a wrong date on a transaction. Also what does the Transactions tab show in the Job Tracker for this job?
Hi Todd, running the WIP report with an open start to capture all transactions yields the same results. The Transactions tab on the job tracker looks like below where there are several transactions after MFG-STK but the various ASM > INS > DMR transactions are accounted for in the appropriate scrap buckets.
Did you find a solution to this? I am having a similar problem with negative costs on WIP report. Using the production detail report, i narrowed it down to a single operation where the labor/burden costs were about $5900 while only around $900 of labor shows up on the labor transactions resulting in a -$5000 in WIP on the WIP report.
