Why Won’t QuickBooks Let Me Build This Assembly?
Computer programs can be frustrating when they don’t let you do what you want. They are supposed to be a tool that helpsyou run your business! One complaint that I hear often from QuickBooks manufacturing users is that the program won’t let them build an assembly when they can see that they have the necessary parts on hand. Today we’ll look at a common cause for this problem.
Although QuickBooks lets you sell items that you don’t have (letting your on-hand inventory balance go negative), it won’t let you consume items that you don’t have in a build. If you want to build an assembly, you must have the parts, or it will mark the build as pending.
Timing is Everything…
Let’s look at a simple assembly. My Widget requires a Cog and three Wheels.
If I look at the Item List, I see that I have plenty of both on hand, so I should be able to make at least 33 Widgets.
However, when I go to Build Assemblies to build my Widget, you can see that the program will not let me build any!
The key here is timing. In QuickBooks we have a great deal of flexibility when working with transactions. We aren’t forced to use today’s date – you can enter any date you wish. You can go back in time, you can even go into the future. Even though you have this flexibility, however, you are still constrained by time. The Item List doesn’t take the date into account. It shows you the sum of all transactions. Let’s look at a QuickReport for the Cog item:
Note the date of the bill? Now go back to the Build Assemblies screen shot I included before. See the build date in the lower left? It is 7/30/2008 – one day before the receipt. Builds are date sensitive – they see the inventory balance on the build date and in this case you haven’t received the items that you need to build.
This is a simple scenario, of course. In your business things are likely to be much more complicated. The principle holds true, though – inventory balances are date sensitive. It is easy to enter a transaction like a receipt with a wrong date. Perhaps the purchasing manager was behind on entering receipts and entered the current date when she caught up with the paperwork, rather than the actual date the items were received. Possibly the manufacturing foreman was entering several builds at a time, and the date carried over from the prior transaction that was entered so this date wasn’t correct. There are many reasons why dates and inventory balances can get out of synch.
In this particular case we can correct the problem either by changing the date of the receipt or the date of the build. Do not make an inventory adjustment to correct the balances, as that will just create more problems than are solved. Once you change either of the dates, the program will let you issue the build.
Changing Dates can Create Pending Builds
You do have to be careful about changing dates of transactions, as you can create other problems this way. Fortunately, QuickBooks tends to give you warnings about some of these problems. You need to pay attention to these warnings and understand what the implications are.
Let’s take my example from above. We’ll correct the date on the receipt to make it 7/30/2008, so that we now can issue the build on that date.
After this, let’s say that someone entered another transaction in error, or went back and changed another date in a receipt transaction. Something that decreases the on hand balance on 7/30/2008. For example, that receipt could be deleted or changed to an older date. Or an inventory adjustment could be entered for an earlier date that decreases the quantity of inventory on hand on 7/30/2008. Is this a problem? We have already issued the build, so the parts have been consumed and I have my 3 Widgets in stock…
If I go back and delete that receipt I will get a warning:
By deleting the receipt, I don’t have the items I need to build the assembly on that date. QuickBooks is telling me that if I want to go ahead, it will mark the build as Pending. This also means that I won’t have those three Widgets in stock, so they aren’t available to a higher level assembly or for sale.
Related posts:
- QuickBooks Shuts Down When Issuing a Build
- QuickBooks Manufacturing Tutorial
- Tracking QuickBooks BOM Revisions
- Manufacturing WIP in QuickBooks
- QuickBooks Groups for Custom Manufacturers
Category: Manufacturing and Inventory, Working with QuickBooks
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70′s, and remembers releasing his first commercial accounting software product when you had a one-floppy disk drive system, loading the program from one floppy and then replacing that with the other floppy to hold the data. He has a special interest in inventory and manufacturing software for small businesses. Charlie is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor and participates extensively in the QuickBooks Community user forums under the ID of CCRussell. Visit his CCRSoftware web site for information about his QuickBooks add-on products. Charlie can be reached at charlie.russell@sleeter.com
He is also the author of the California Wildflower Hikes blog and a regular blog contributor to the Intuit Inner Circle.
Connect with Charlie at Google
Related posts:
Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
I get the whole date thing, but it seems it won’t let me build it because I have a negative in the drop ship field (at least that is all I can figure). I can’t receive the item, because I won’t be and the vendor is slow on bills. Any thoughts?
Ellen, are you using the “advanced inventory” feature in Enterprise?
Yes I am
You can’t build the assembly until you have the parts on hand on the date of the build. When you use the “site” feature, the additional complication is that you must have the necessary quantity at the site you select for each component. If you have a negative quantity at one site but not at another, you can use that other site or you can do a transfer to get the quantity to the right place.
Negative quantities are always something you want to avoid for a lot of reasons. QB doesn’t really handle negative quantities the way that we might want to. Besides, if you think about it, having a “negative quantity” isn’t something that can happen in reality – only in computers. You either have it, or you don’t. If you have a negative quantity, you have to determine why, and work to prevent that from happening.
You can receive an item before you get the bill in QuickBooks, if that is part of the problem.
I agree with that and that would make sense, but I have found that even if I have the necessary amount in the site I am pulling it from, if there is a negative in any other site, it knocks it to pending. This is not the first bug I have found with it, maybe I will report it too. The reason we run with negatives is drop shipping. We receive items and enter the bills later, but with a drop ship we never receive the item, just invoice it and wait for the bill to come at a later date. So until that bill comes we run a negative amount in the drop ship site. I don’t know any other to handle that one. The advanced inventory also comes automatically with the drop ship site and uses it in your PO’s when you want to ship directly from a vendor. It is not in front of me now, but I believe if you do a PO and put in a different ship to customer than yourself, qb makes it automatically a drop ship. I’ll have to look at that further next week.
Thanks
Ellen
I have this very same problem, I work for a precast company so we have to receive raw materials w/o a bill> use materials to build concrete> use concrete to build products for selling> so ultimately I have 2 different types of builds. So what I do is build the concrete right after I rec materials on a 1 day delay. Then one time a week I build my products for selling and invoice for them. Here is my problem when I receive inventory w/o a bill and later get my invoices and enter them it will turn some of my builds to pending because it says that I changed the reciept date. How can I get around this issue because it is driving me crazy! My inventory is always off…. HELP!
Rena, that is a big problem, and you are seeing what happens with bills coming later. The simplest workaround is to keep the date on the bill the same as the date on the receipt. That doesn’t mess up the builds and inventory levels. But then your bills may have the wrong date for aging – in many cases this isn’t a big deal. You can look at Enterprise V12 with the “Enhanced Inventory Receiving” option – that fixes that problem by separating the receipt from the bill. However, as you can see from my various articles on that feature, there are other things you have to watch out for in EIR.