Hi Keith; I understand the problem, and I will say that it isn't straightforward in LSMB at the moment. Assemblies will be the best way to go, but it can take some effort to come up with a useful way to do this. As I say, I am sure that the whole manufacturing side will be reworked as time goes on but for now, this is what the capabilities are.
On 1/15/07, Keith Nybakke <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I understand this, but let me pose an example that better illustrates > my problem: > > A blacksmith makes a horseshoe from a bar of steel. There is only one > component in the assembly, a length of steel. But the end product > certainly has a value that is much higher than the value of the > single component. A blacksmith is not going to purchase one > horseshoe's worth of steel bar whenever an unshod horse appears. No, > he will have a raw material inventory of steel bar stock. He will > take what he needs from his inventory and fabricate one horseshoe. Right. You buy bulk steel or iron, and make the horse shoe to order. For common goods this is still straightforward: You order the steel, sell the horseshoe, and stock in retrospect (i.e. at the end of the day, you have -10 horseshoes on hand so you stock 10 to bring this up to 0). Everybody is happy :-) However, I suspect your situation is more complex than that. If you are doing custom work, you may have to deal with the issue of items with varying components, or on-the-fly customizations which assemblies are going to have a hard time dealing with. The example is in this case more similar to a sandwich shop and the question of how much lettuce did we put on sandwiches (not all sandwiches of each category might have lettuce depending on what the customer wants)... And therein lies the problem... This is not something we can deal with gracefully at the moment, but it is something that is on the radar. The only way to do this at the moment is to have the optional inventory items also appear on the invoice. > > I'm sure you are starting to get the idea behind the work flow in a > custom product job shop and how the accounting is different from an > value-added assembly business or resale operation or a service > provider. A blacksmith shop is a small-lot, custom product job-shop. > Yes, he creates and sells a product. But, it's a product that derives > its value primarily from the service portion of its creation, not its > material portion, so raw material is very close to just an expense > and is not as clearly accountable in the cost of goods sold. Well, I would argue that the assembly unit is primarily a materials and service sort of thing. You can create an assembly to track this and this way you can get a fairly clear picture of how much labor was tied to what sort of income. The larger issue of custom additions to the invoice becomes a bigger issue, but we are looking at that. Ideally, I would think you would want to be able to track the cost of materials plus the labor time against the sale. There are two ways to do this at the moment: assemblies and projects. However, assemblies are the more invoice-friendly option. Hope this helps, Chris Travers ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys - and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ Ledger-smb-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/ledger-smb-users
