Inventory Parts Conversion

[motv8td]

We are a wood production facility using QBooks Enterprise Version. We take big pieces of wood and turn them into many little pieces of wood. I am looking for ways to convert these inventory items easily within QBooks. When the wood comes in it is counted by Board Foot. When it is manufactured it is counted by Lineal Foot. If you have some experience with this please lend me some thoughts. I am a bit new so keep it gentle please :)

Thanks in advance,
Mark

[Shufflinpaper]

Hey Mark, sounds like we are in the same business. We manufacture hickory striking tool handles in East Tennessee.We run a sawmill on-site. I'd really like to know the answer to your question, too. The former accountant retired and moved away and I'm from a service background, so I'm learning Manufacturing.

Best,

[gibbo]

The reason no-one has replied is because there is no good answer. The Inventory module in QuickBooks is not suited to handling some things. It has a very simple approach. When you buy things, you know how many you are buying. Then you can sell them in those bits. But getting stock in as one thing (board feet) and selling it in another (lineal feet) is not something it can handle well. because of the nature of the products you are handling, there is no way to know how much you will get to sell each time you buy. Wastage will be different every time. An average would help, but it would still be untidy.
An external program that is not tied to the accounting is often the best way to handle these types of problems. Because they are not tied to the accounting, they can be flexible in what they allow you to do. They can break rules when they need to.

[Joey]

John is correct. The Manufacturing & Wholesale version DOES deal with inventory parts that can be used to "build" another inventory item that is subsequently sold as a unit. But it doesn't really apply to things that you purchase and make into smaller stuff including the waste product that would be involved in that production.
Basically if you purchase oil by the drum and sell it by the quart, you would need to convert the purchase into quarts when you receive it for proper count and costing purposes. You would have to manually adjust for spillage, etc.

[plg]

You can probably find the solution in the back of any trade magazines you may receive. In virtually every field there is a classified section at the back, as well as possibly some display ads, for industry specific software. It is not always cheap and many try to make do with QB or some other "under $ 500" software.

Nothing under $ 500 handles raw materials into finished goods. QB & MYOB will handle "assembly" type production, but you need finished components, not raw materials.

I sold what is called "vertical market software" such as what you are looking for. Unfortunately, I never sold any for wood product manufacturing. (I did sell a barcode system for a sawmill.)

You might also check with some of the shareware sites like tucows.com. There are some real strange programs available there, usually written by someone "in the business" who thinks "Hey, I could sell this."

Many of these programs will export to QB, but it's often more bother than it's worth setting up a sales export. You can enter daily sales totals by hand in several minutes and know they are right.

Anyhow, trade pubs, trade shows and shareware is how I'd go about finding something. Or, ask a friendly competitor.