We would like to be able to maintain a “future cost” for our assemblies based on known future price increases. Our old system had a “going to” cost that got rolled every month (the standard was fixed for the year) but we have not found any such functionality in Epicor.
For example, assume finished good ABC is made up of three materials, A, B and C. Material cost of each is $10, so the standard cost is $30 (labor is magically all volunteer in this simple world) and the value of the 10 on hand is $300.
We have been notified that the price of B will double next month and have been asked to submit a quote for 50 ABC to be delivered in two months. If we price it based on our current standard costs, we will be under-pricing it.
If we do a cost adjustment on B to reflect the new price (so that we can roll the new standard for ABC), it will artificially increase the value of B on hand and the value of ABC on hand, even though no transaction has occurred.
If we future-date the cost adjustment, is there a way to roll the future cost for informational purposes?
I am going to do some research and experimenting with this, but thought I would see if anyone has solved this… we can’t be the first company wanting to do this.
@timshuwy has mentioned on this list previously that you CAN have multiple Cost IDs in Epicor. Some people use them for historical purposes but you could certainly use it for “what if” roll-ups.
Yup… as @Mark_Wonsil said, you can create additional cost IDs… copy from your current cost id and into the new cost ID Table… roll the costs, change costs… as long as that cost id is not associated to a SITE, then it is all just a playground. “posting” it will do nothing UNLESS it is assigned to a SITE.
I am stuck a little earlier in the process… how/where do I store the future cost of a purchased part without affecting anything current? I did a future-dated cost adjustment, but when I issued the part to a job today, it pulled in the future standard cost, not today’s cost.
This better than Christmas and my birthday combined! May have more questions about displaying the info.
In my head (but not yet vetted with anyone else)… we have a cost Group called “Current”. Purchasing updates the parts in Current when a price change is announced. We roll “Current” every week (but do not post anywhere; this is strictly my parallel universe) and display the results in Part Tracker General | Costs.
I have found the values in PartCost, but am unsure of how to limit the display to only the values in Current (vs. another cost group to which the same part might belong).
Not sure about multiple Cost IDs, but multiple cost groups are useful. Right now there is one that holds the current standard cost and another where I can do “what if” scenarios.
I think multiple cost IDs would be used if you wanted to maintain two different types of costing methologies.
Some people save the current CostID group into a new one by year with ending values (with the CostID = to the year) to do year over year comparisons. Things like that.
Another possibility is to try different scenarios (one CostID for each) based on predicted labor absorption and have an easy way to change the costs based on actual work.
having multiple cost IDs really takes the software back to the roots of the way product costing USED to work.
Jumping into the Wayback Machine… we used to have the Active "or “Current” cost… this is the cost table that was currently being used. Then we had the future table. This held the costs that we were gathering up for a future cost ROLLUP and cost ROLL
(cost ROLLUP = a BOM Rollup. Cost ROLL was when you “Rolled” the FUTURE cost into the Current cost). Back in the olden days, there was no automatic posting of the changes… you had to run a “before” and “After” report, and do a journal entry for the difference. Anyway… back in the 1980’s… we would also snapshot each “Future” with a date… “2020 future”, “2021future”, etc… then we could compare the current with any historical versions as well.
How to compare? Well… you can always write your own dashboards to show the different values.
