These notes include changes and updates going back to version 2.7.1.0.
Here’s what’s changed
Major Things
Reconfigured the Inventory Accounting System
Reconfigured the inventory accounting system to separate inventory availability state from inventory location.
The purpose of this is to separate the concept of an item’s “availability state” from its storage location.
Previously, availability was derived from the inventory location. For example, ‘Warehouse’ or rack locations could have been Available, and ‘QC Hold’ location could have been Unavailable. It was not possible to set different availability states within the same inventory location.
Also important, this allows for future provisioning of First-In, First-Out (FIFO) and Last-In, First-Out (LIFO) cost flow assumptions.
New inventory availability states are:
- On Order aka Incoming — inventory ordered but not yet received
- Available — freely available for use right now
- Committed aka Reserved — assigned / allocated to some intended purpose, like a production job
- Unavailable — good inventory temporarily on the sidelines, eg: in QC Hold
- Total — sum of On Order, Available, Committed, Unavailable
- Sold — can be used as a bucket to account for a period of sold goods*
- Scrapped — can be used as a bucket to account for a period of scrapped materials or goods*
* Generally these buckets would be zero’ed out at the end of some accounting period, like quarterly or annually.
These new categories are seen in the main Inventory Totals screen as well as in an individual item’s Inventory screen in its master data record.
Inventory Minimum and Maximum Levels by Location
Can now set minimum and maximum desired on hand inventory levels for items for every individual inventory location. Can also set a sub-location (such as a rack or drawer number or name) and apply a ranking order that is useful when wanting to count or pull items in a particular walking order.
Minimum levels are the inventory restock or reorder level, and maximums are the target level to restock to.
Find this new screen under the Inventory menu in the ribbon, and then “Actions” and “Restock Inventory”.
Inventory Restocking Requirements Action
Added a screen where you can create a list of all items that are needed to restock a particular inventory location, for example: retail locations or workstations needing stable inventory levels.
You set the source from where inventory will be pulled, and you can also adjust the standard mins and maxes to advance or delay the restock for various items, or inflate or deflate the restock, respectively.
Uses the min & max on hand values established in the previous section.
Find this new screen under the Inventory menu in the ribbon, and then “Actions” and “Set Inventory Levels”, or within the Item Details screen for each item’s master data record.
Minor Things
- Tidied up lots of little sizing and formatting issues.
- Sped up load times and responsiveness of many screens.
Bug Fixes
- A number of smaller bugs fixed here and there.
Running the update
If you need some help installing the update, see the quick video here.