Inventory Control Overview

A predominant feature of the Material module is the Items form. The Items form provides a list of all the items in stock. Each item records things you want to track, such as quantity and price.

Supplementary features of the Material module include:

• Item/Warehouse
• Item Stockroom Locations
• Vendor Contracts
• Current and Standard Routings
• Physical Inventory functions
• Management of Obsolete and Slow-Moving Inventory
• MRP and APS planning

When you add an item to the Items form, only general information about the item is entered. The Item Warehouse form maintains relation between item and warehouse along with warehouse specific information as cycle counting details, safety stock, etc. The Stockroom Locations file contains the amount of the item on hand along with the location at which it is stored. If items are kept in several locations, you can enter multiple records into the file.

On the Items form, Controls tab, you can flag some inventory as obsolete or slow-moving. This functionality lets you improve material movement and inventory level management by preventing or discouraging all processes that would add such items to inventory.

The Vendor Contracts form allows you to enter information about an item which is vendor specific, such as the vendor's part number for this item. This record contains historical information, and you can enter multiple vendors per item. When you enter an item on a PO line item, the Vend Item field contains the vendor's item number as entered on the Vendor Contracts form.

The Current routing:

• Shows you how an item is built
• Consists of a list of operations and sub-materials.

The Current routing serves as a template for job routings. Instead of having to enter the job routing each time you want to build an item, just copy it from the current routing.

The Standard routing is useful for calculating the costs on the Item Costs form.

The Physical Inventory function provides the capability to take a physical count of every item on hand, input the counts into the system, and compare the book count with the actual count for each location of the item. After the actual counts are audited, edited, and approved, they may be posted to the Items record. This posting adjusts the inventory counts as well as the value for all items and locations that have a discrepancy between the book count and the actual count.