Confessions of a Dynamics 365 Business Central Consultant

The Adjust Cost – Item Entries batch job adjusts inventory values in value entries so that you use the correct adjusted cost for updating the general ledger and so that sales and profit statistics are up to date. The cost adjustment forwards any cost changes from inbound entries, such as those for purchases or production output, to the related outbound entries, such as sales or transfers.

Basically, it will update your COGS and the Unit Cost on the item card to the correct cost that the item was brought in. Simply put, you HAVE to run this process BEFORE you do any meaningful financial and costing analysis.

It doesn’t matter what your costing method is. Doesn’t matter what your setup is. You HAVE to run this if you want to do inventory costing analysis in Dynamics NAV (Navision).

Here’s what the process looks like in RTC:

Here’s what the process looks like in Classic Client:

Note that the Adjust Cost – Item Entries will look different depending on the what version of Navision you use.

If you do not run this, no analyst in the world can begin to figure out what exactly the cost should be and address any incorrect inventory values you may have.

Side Effects
Note that if your company has never ran this before, or have not ran this in a long time, there may be detrimental affects on your inventory and COGS. Here’s a partial list of what you may encounter:

1. Your COGS on the G/L will go wild. The reason for this is that most companies, when they do not run the adjust cost, will use the general journal to “calculate” what the COGS should be. So when you do decide to let NAV do what it’s suppose to do, you will need to reverse these journal entries.

2. Your Inventory on the G/L will go wild. The reason is the same as above. The journal entries will need to be reversed.

3. Your item unit cost will go wild. The reason, again, is the same as above. A lot of times when you make an inventory journal adjustment to “take out” the inventory with the incorrect cost and positive adjust in the item with the correct cost, you are only doing it on the surface. The way NAV allocates and applies the inventory entries will most likely be different than what you adjusted.

Why Bother Going Though the Trouble?
Looking at the side affects, you may be wondering, why do I want to bother going through this process if I’m running fine as it is? The answer is simple, but it will reduce time and free up your company’s human resources to focus on important things.

Think about the manual spreadsheets and human memories that your salespeople need to figure out what cost the item should be before you can quote a competitive price to your customers. Think about the time it takes your internal accounting staff to figure out what your bottom line should look like on the financial statement. Think about if those times are freed, what other amazing things your employees can come up with to make your business even better.

Conclusion
A lot of companies will give their Trial balance to their CPA and let them make do the calculation. But realize that what they’re doing is just an estimate. It is NOT accurate. The CPA’s priority is to make the number seem reasonable so he/she can do your tax return and having paper trail if there’s an audit. His/her goal is not to get the accurate inventory cost.

Ask any good accountant, reconcilation is one of the most time consuming and useless tasks.

Ask any good salesperson, having a quote rejected because they cannot get the competitive price to the customer is not only a colossal waste of time on the company, but also for the customer. It reflects on the reputation of your company

Ask any good business owner, not having accurate profit and loss for each transaction… Well, you get the idea.

Let Dynamics NAV do its thing so it can help your business can do its thing.

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.

I recently signed up to be a guest columnist on the Microsoft Dynamics NAV community site. I wrote an article with the list of common steps to finding and reconciling the difference between your inventory valuation and the inventory G/L account. The article is posted in the Dynamics NAV Community site hosted by Microsoft.

The article is found here:
https://community.dynamics.com/product/nav/navnontechnical/b/navguestcolumn/archive/2011/09/12/reconciling-inventory-value-to-your-inventory-general-ledger-account.aspx

Again, the focus is to save you time so you can go home on time.