Any advice on tracking shop supplies through Epicor? This would include paper towels, gloves, etc…
My initial thought is to create a part for each of them, with it’s own part class of “shop supplies”. Then, order these supplies to a bin, which can be the closet we store them in. However, because we can’t “issue” these supplies I would have associates do bi monthly cycle counts to adjust out any consumed qty for these items. Giving us an updated total twice a month for re ordering.
I also have a concern that adjusting them out will mess up the GL…
If anyone has any ideas or has tried it and found it’s not worth it let me know please.
Just make them non-stock, non-quantity bearing parts. What that will do is when they are ordered to stock, they don’t actually get added in on the inventory number, but the dollars will be issued to the GL account set up for that part class. That GL account should be part of a budget for shop supplies.
Unsolicited advice: You should not try to stock and inventory things like paper towels and gloves. It will be a disaster and what seems like a simple thing quickly becomes a huge pain. Are you really worried about using too many paper towels? Enough that you want to keep count of them? If you really want to, you can make a reason code to put the subtractions to the correct GL account. For supplies like gloves, welding tips, zip ties, etc, we have a fastenal vending machine that people just put their employee number into the machine to watch for abuse.
Now, I get having problems with running out of things because no one says anything, we have that problem.
I’m trying to make a solution to so that the shop floor can simply hit a button to order these low value items when they get low (like an amazon dash button). Once we get the security settings for rest set up correctly I think there are solutions out there that should be able to set that up. I don’t have my hardware yet (it’s on order) so I haven’t set everything up yet, but that is the direction I am trying to go for things like safety labels, nuts and bolts, and other low value, hard to inventory items.
And there is one more tool I forgot about, Issue Miscellaneous material. Again, I don’t recommend keeping close tabs on low value items, but for discretionary use high value items, you can do a miscellaneous issue instead of a quantity adjustment. They use the same reason codes, so I would imagine they will hit the same GL accounts, so accounting wise, it probably doesn’t make a difference, but for keeping track of why they change happened, it might.
