Abnormal Item Charges

Overview
Dynamics NAV is a ERP software that’s built on best business practice. However, that’s not to say that the users of Navision operates on best business practice.

This post describes what I would like to call Abnormal Item Charges. Again, as with what I’ve described with Abnormal Posting Date, don’t bother looking it up on any GAAP dictionary or NAV website. It’s a term that I made up because I lack the vocabulary to think of a better name. English, afterall, is my second language.

What is Abnormal Item Charge?
Abnormal Item Charge are posted item charges that are applied to the open Purchase Order that has not been received or invoiced.

An Example
A lot of times when a company orders some items from factories, they will buy the finishes of the goods that you want to order, i.e. special metallic paint. Because of the competitiveness of factories, they will sometime offer the company to pay only partial (or no payment at all) until the products are successfully manufacturered. The special finishes they will have to pay now.

So at the time of the PO creation, the company will only have paid for the special metallic paint. The company wants to pay for the paint while allocating the cost of the paint to the inventory that they will possiblity receive in the future. So an item charge line is created on the PO and allocated the cost of the paint ot the purchase lines.

The Effects on G/L
As we discussed previously, this item charge will post to the following G/L accounts:
+ Inventory
– A/P
+ Item Charge G/L Account (Purchases)
– Direct Cost Applied

So the additional cost of the item is correctly accrued to the inventory value.

The Problem
The additional cost components of the item has been allocated and correctly posted to the G/L. The problem is, there’s no inventory for the additional cost to apply to.

This means that the value entries will be created, but it will not reflect on the inventory valuation report until the items are received.

The Solution
In version 6.0 (NAV2009), they put out a fix for this in codeunit 90. Now if you try to post an item charge when there are no item ledger entry, it’ll give an error. However, this solution causes problems for the business case described above.

The solution for this was to comment out the code in NAV2009, then create a report that captures the additional cost posted to the G/L that did not have the corrosponding item ledger. We call this report the Abnormal Item Charge report. It’s a pretty simple report. If your company has the same problem, let me know. I’ll send you the report.

EDIT: One of my colleagues reminded me that we can also use the Prepayment Functionality in the US version to handle this. Basically, we would set the item charge line prepayment percentage to 100. Doing this will post the transaction into the prepayment account instead of the inventory account.

Conclusion
Again, NAV is designed to be best practice. This cause in particular forces us to break that best practice because it makes business sense. Note that I don’t usually like to break NAV’s built in best practices, but in this situation, it was a frequent part of the some of our client’s business, especially when factories are competing for orders in a down economy.

5 thoughts on “Abnormal Item Charges

  1. Myrna Torres says:

    Our client is using Nav 5.0 version. They are encountering unbalance g/l entry against value entry when using item charge. You maybe call this abnormal item charge. When giving additional discount to their customer for a month sales, they use Credit Memo using item charge, then assigned to multiple sales invoice. With this practice, they sometimes encounter unbalance value entry against G/L entry. The g/l entry is always correct but the value entry is sometimes incorrect.

    Can you send us hotfix for this. Thank you.

  2. Myrna Torres says:

    Thank you Alex for your reply.
    May we request then the Abnormal Item Charge report that you mentioned?

  3. Louise says:

    Hi, I’ve had similar cases because our client wanted us to develop a custom item charge computation. As a result, I ended up receiving the same error you mentioned in the post because of some grn having 0 cost values. Can you send me the report and enlighten me in how I may apply the solution you mentioned to my current situation. Also I have also commented out that specific error code, I just wanted to know how you did it with yours. Thank you in advance if ever you still reply.

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