Long story short, is there an inherent benefit/drawback to using Quantity Adjustment vs. Issue/Return Miscellaneous Material? I’ve been advised to use Return Misc. Material but it feels like a quantity adjustment would do the same thing. I read elsewhere that Quantity Adjustment makes an ADJ-QTY transaction where Issue/Return Material would be STK-UKN. Does that matter to Epicor somewhere?
We are having a similar discussion here.
I think one of the main reasons to make the distinction would be for GL/accounting purposes, trying to get the money to get caught in more accurate buckets.
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We disabled access to Issue/Return Misc Mtl since we didn’t want floor peeps to unilaterally make inventory disappear.
Accounting just uses Qty. Adjustment. There doesn’t appear to be any difference. Posting Engine even says both routes use the Inventory Adjustment GL Control Context (and therefore posts it to the same account).
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Secured ADJ-QTY here so can’t be done on floor - only by approved office/accounting staff so there’s an audit trail on OH, GL impact, etc. Didn’t come across any STK-UKN records in PartTran so that’s likely on lockdown too. Wouldn’t Issue/Return Misc Mtl also require a specific job to process under? Would affect job costing so maybe that’s the reason for both…
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It will matter to your Finance people. Be nice to them. They control your paycheck!
EDIT: It will matter to them right up to the point where THEY say it doesn’t matter to them.
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I think following the issue/return process adds extra visibility into what exactly happened to the material. A better paper trail.
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Just a personal opinion, ADJ-QTY is a failure to manage material. It should only be used to indicate that our process is broken, and we have no idea where the material came from or went. I prefer UKN when we have some possible reason for the change, engineering grabbed some material for testing, sales samples, etc.
Yes, both can be abused and should be minimized for “fixing” quantities.
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Definitely explains the lockdown here…and has imposed a great deal more discipline than on our old system…
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My specific question stems from a returned Configured non-stock part. We would not stock it - so we are breaking it back down into raw materials. I see several good considerations. And I figured it all mattered to finance… just not sure if the different methods look different to the finance folks. Maybe it’s buried in our posting rules. I suppose I’ll test it both ways and make sure it doesn’t do something unexpected to my accounting friends.
Yeah, popular request and unrelated to this thread.
Ability to disassemble a finished part to put materials back into Inventory - Idea 3684
It has my vote already 
Kind of. I already have a solution for the returning of the parts (since Epicor doesn’t provide one out of the box)… but I didn’t even know Issue/Return Misc. Material existed until I was reading the instructions from one of our consultants who taught us how to handle this situation. And it got me wondering why Epicor made two different things for seemingly a similar purpose. I figured there was a specific use case for one vs. the other. Hoping someone knew off the top of their head.
From what I read above, it seems like I should use Issue/Return material for things that we are intentionally consuming or creating parts when there isn’t a traditional transaction happening. Qty Adjustment would then be used only for correcting incorrect quantity only.
The user guide has an example: a manager wants to take a part to a trade show. So they would use issue misc. material. Then when they return from the trade show, they can return it using return misc. material. This makes sense. Issue/Return is designed to support a bi-directional transaction. The quantity adjustment is designed for a single direction transaction.
How does it provide extra visibility? They appear to have the same information in Part Transaction History (other than a different transaction type).
I think @jgehling is referring to the fact that you see a transaction happening against a job with Return. Where the adjustment does not have any context associated with it automatically. Someone would need to enter a Reference to know why the transaction happened.
Does Return Misc take any cost off of the Job?
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To put a fine point on it, ADJ-QTY is an admission of failure. Disassembly does not meet that definition. You KNOW why parts are going to stock AND you even know the job.
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There is no reference to a job in a Return Misc. Material. Unless I’m doing it wrong.
I was looking for how Epicor differentiates them. Will they agree to that definition? Maybe, maybe not. But I agree that everything except the quantity adjustment is a proactive solution to keeping inventory counts accurate. And therefore, if you have to use quantity adjustment, you have failed to handle the count properly.
At the end of the day, that’s the differentiation I was after. I still don’t understand how Issue/Return Material gives any better traceability but it’s at least designed around the idea that there are circumstances that don’t always fit neatly into one of the other solutions. It would be nice if there was a way to tie the return to the issue and maybe a different set of reason codes than a quantity adjustment.
My opinion:
Qty adjustment is for fixing mistakes when all else is lost.
The other is for when you know whats wrong and you want a good audit trail.
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One other thing, you are not necessarily tied to these two commands. When we start with the business problem then we open up to the possibility of others solutions. See what @Nancy_Hoyt does in this post using the salvage command.
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I’m glad you posted this. It’s another way to skin this cat. I’ll try this along with the other two methods in Test and follow it through on the financial side and see what that looks like. And I’ll also test as far as intuitive and number of things to do to follow the process through. I’ll report my findings back.
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Looking quick at the app the Sales Order/Line/Release looks like Job Num/Asm/Mtl. 
Interesting reading in help. Apparently, the screens are for Sales.
Run the Return Miscellaneous Material app to return items to inventory that have been removed through the Issue Miscellaneous Materials app. Building on the previous example, the manager returns from the trade show and uses the ‘Return Miscellaneous Materials’ app to return the sample item back into inventory.