With a lot of our clients, inventory allocations are one of the most important pieces of data end-users work with on a daily basis. Inventory allocations are so important for not only production reasons, but because customers call in and end-users need to know what is available to be sold.
Equally as common, the formula for what is considered AVAILABLE in the ERP systems we have utilized up until now is the age-old math equation of ON HAND – ALLOCATED = AVAILABLE (to be sold or used in a production environment). In this formula, allocations would mostly be derived from any open sales orders for an item, as well as any production orders being processed and not quite posted.
However, I was glad to discover during our customer implementations of Acumatica that their ERP system adds a bit of a wrinkle to the standard equation that all other applications adhere to when calculating available stock, by including a field at the ITEM CLASS level called “Availability Calculation” as per below (circling the “allow negative qty” box as well to point out another cool feature in the system to be discussed at a later date).
Acumatica’s definition on the window seen below is “on this form, you can define the rules for calculating the availability of stock items that belong to a particular item class. You can add new rules, modify existing rules, and delete unused rules if they are not assigned to any item classes.”
In laymen’s terms however, what this window will allow one to control is an entire class of inventory items in your system as to their “availability views”, so you can add more control as your customer service team fields calls from your clients as they receive orders.
Perhaps there are some sets of items you would prefer order takers NOT to turn away customers on because they might be commonly transferred from one local storage warehouse to your main one, and therefore would like SKUs such as these to be included in your availability QTY calculation, and can do so with a simple checkmark here:
Maybe there are a different set of items where you have noticed that customers normally don’t follow up on backorders that have been created, due to the fact that they could be food type items which are needed that day. In that scenario, unchecking the box for this class of items would be advisable so as not to decrease availability for such SKUs if they have indeed been backordered:
This level of inventory control in Acumatica is yet another feature that I have found to be very different than what I have experienced over the years from other systems, which can be a very useful tool for your clients to utilize in the end.
Need help or interested in learning more about Acumatica? Schedule a free consultation here, or give us a call at (212) 869-9300.
