Accounting for Quantity and Weight in Stock Control

Accounting for Quantity and Weight in Stock...

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I have a client who is currently using Sage Line 50 for DOS (yes I know!!), who whats to get the computer system to do more for them and reduce the amount of work to get useful reports.

They are a meat processor in that they buy animals, get them slaughtered off-site and cut them up into the numerous different cuts of meat. They sell each cut per kg and Sage Line 50 for Windows can do the reporting on this side but the director also wants to be able to enter the quantity of boxes/sides etc sold on each invoice. This quantity is only for delivery verification and reporting not in the calculation of invoice value.

For example, they want to know how many sides of beef they sell in a period and the total weight of those sides.

Any ideas??

Ian Knell

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By David Carter
11th Nov 2005 21:07

one last comment
Beef, Pork etc would normally be recorded in the Product Category field in each Product master record.

This would then free up the Department field.

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By Richard Willis
09th Nov 2005 09:21

Does his version have BOM's
Ian

If the version of SL50 has a BOM facility, he could specify an assembled item (a standard box) for each cut or size of box in which each cut is sold. He could then set up an item for each cut/Kg. As he butchered the carcasses he would add to stock the various cuts by weight. By specifying the appropriate number of Kg for each box, he would accumulate the Kg. sold as he shifted the boxes.

This depends somewhat on the boxes containing a standard weight.

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By iknell
09th Nov 2005 13:43

Won't work
I've suggested this to the client but unfortunately due to the nature of the business they do not send standard weight boxes (each side of beef weighs a different amount).

Thanks anyway

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By David Carter
09th Nov 2005 19:20

Use the "Order Taken by" field
When you enter a sales invoice, go to the "Order Taken By" field in the Order Details tab. Usually, this defaults to MANAGER. Type your number of boxes and weight in here.

To see the information, go into Audit Trail. Right click on any of the column headings. Sage will display a list of the fields available. Tick the Order Taken by field at the bottom of the list.

The Order Taken By field and its contents will now be displayed on the Audit Trail screen.

If you have 20 boxes which weigh 100 kilos, type 20-100 into the Order Taken by field. Export the audit trail into Excel. Split the field into two by using Excel's Text to Columns command, with the delimiter being "Other" and - You then have two numeric fields with values 20 and 100, which you can use to create reports.

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By David Carter
10th Nov 2005 18:58

analysing multiple lines
I don't think you are going to get a Sage report to do this. You will have to export into Excel and calculate total boxes there.

If you have to analyse by line, Unit is certainly there, but to get it into Sage you will have to use Report designer and export from the Invoice Items table, I think.

If you could get it into Financials - Audit Trail it would be simpler. Then you just have to export from the screen via File - Send to Excel.

Get it into the Audit Trail by either:

1) use the Department code. Dept 1 = 1 side, dept 2 = 2 sides etc.

2) or just add the number of sides each time at the end of the Product description. Put a suitable delimiter first. eg. 100 kilos of beef made up of 12 sides might be: kilos of beef : 12 sides

In Excel use text to columns with colon as the delimiter to split the description field in two.

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By David Carter
10th Nov 2005 10:21

but does it actually work?!
Thanks Richard, but slightly premature! I didn't actually test it last night.

On my version of Sage, I find this morning that 20-50 isn't coming through on the Financials-Audit Trail. But it DOES come through on the Invoicing screen, though.

Going into teacher mode, there's a useful couple of lessons from this case. First, users often want to store some extra information but there's no specific field for it. No problem. All you have to do is to dig around to find ANY text field that isn't being used, and use that.

Second, you can often use text and description fields to record lots of analysis data for reports. For example, suppose David Carter works for Richard Willis who works in Marketing in Southern Division in the UK in Europe. When you set up David Carter as a Cost Centre, make the cost centre code DC, and the cost centre description not David Carter but DC-RW-MKTG-STH-UK-EUR. Then use text to columns to split out the cost centre description in Excel.


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By iknell
10th Nov 2005 13:45

Weight isn't a problem
Because they calculate the cost at weight times price per kg, the weight is entered in the quantity column.

The main problem is that each invoice needs to be multiple lines (butchers may order 10-20 different cuts of meat each day) and the quantity (number of boxes, sides of beef etc) needs to stored against each line.

The only field I can see available in Sage is the text field 'Units' which is picked up from the stock record but not required. The only problem then is that my client isn't the most computer literate and would like the units to be summed on a sage report which isn't possible due to it being a text field.

Any ideas (obviously I could use ODBC link into Excel and re-format using macros etc)?

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By iknell
11th Nov 2005 10:50

Thanks David. I think I have come to the conclusion that it will have to be in the details tab to get any sort of reporting option. Unfortunately we are already using the department number for 1= beef, 2= lamb, 3= pork etc.

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By Richard Willis
10th Nov 2005 08:48

Nice one David!
Lateral thinking at its best.

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