I see some conversation in the archive a decade ago regarding this. Any new ideas on how to do this?
I am trying to find a way to tie out the WIP detail to the WIP on the G/L. It appears the WIP detail is a moving target. Has anyone figured out a way to do this with some level of confidence?
Thanks,
Ed
Just to be clear, is this the Inventory-WIP Reconciliation Report, or the Work In Process Report? I think you mean the second one, but just want to be sure.
Can you explain this a bit more?
The GL is only posted transactions, and jobs in WIP can have unposted labor, mtl, etc.
Also, if you are trying to nail down the Work In Process report, I know you can get bit by jobs that are not closed yet. And even then, I have had to run a job fix program when the totals don’t add up.
Sorry, no real answers there, but there are a lot of pitfalls.
Sorry for the delay, I was out of the office.
Yes it is the WIP report. My CPA wants to see the GL account tie out to the WIP detail report and I have never been able to do that. In years past I would attempt to fix it with general journal adjustments to the G/L account but it seemed like this compounded the error and eventually I was chasing my tail. It feels like there should be some connection to what the report totals and what the G/L reports as a total but I have never been able to figure out what is driving the difference.
Any advice would be appreciated.
I asked our accountant here that looks at it monthly. Let’s call him Fred. He said that our old boss used to be able to get it to tie to the penny after Fred showed him the discrepancy.
I don’t know what that was that our old boss did, and neither does Fred.
Last month he came to me with some staggering discrepancy and I had to run this - user conversion 620:
Don’t run it during working hours! Or during MRP cough might have done that myself the first time cough.
It got it a LOT closer, but I think there were still issues. It might be the closed job thing and making sure to Capture COS/WIP Activity after closing jobs and before checking against the GL.
I don’t have the experience of hunting down the problem to the last penny, so I can’t help any more than that.
Maybe some others here have.
WIP and Inventory are two GL Accounts that should never have any JE’s done against them. Like you found out, anything that looked wrong and was fixed by a JE, would eventually process (running the Capture WIP/COS process, closing open jobs, etc…) would eventual create the same GL entries as your JE. You’d eventually have to undo your original JE with another JE.
The weird thing is: it can go months and months and consistently be off by an insignificant, but consistent amount and then one month it’s 10X or 20X as much with no clear reason as to why. And with 300 individual shipping lines per month and approx 500 jobs in process, it’s impossible to figure out what is happening.
I guess I will keep with my position of not messing with it.
Thanks for the insight,
The most common reason I have seen the WIP report to be off is related to the job closing process.
I am not sure if this applies to you, but I see many people using the backflush function on the job closing to clear shortages and then close the job. If the job close date is in a later fiscal period than the job complete date, the transaction date back to the complete date, but fall off the month end report based on the closed date.
That sounds like what is happening.
Thanks,
The best solution to this is to set the process for people to close jobs before the end of the month. if any need to get closed after the end of the month, unless it is a big variance, I’ll either wait for it to be reconciled and then set the complete and closed date to the current period, or backdate the closed date to the prior period and rerun the capture process.
