Understanding the Work Order

February 5, 2016 at 3:48 PMThomas Riemann

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog! I hope you got a chance to check out our previous post about Lot/Serial numbers within the All Orders software. If your company keep's track of Lot/Serial number's and you would like to learn more about this feature, please check out last week's post below. Today, I would like to talk about the productions side of thing's. I would like to briefly go over our Work Order feature.

If there's a production aspect of your business, and you're creating new items out of singular components (raw material's), then you're likely to use our key feature, the Work Order. Work Orders include to major aspects of production: Part and Processes. Every Work Order will consist of a number of Steps/Operations. This will describe the labor and manufacturing involved with producing the item in question.

Step/Operations can contain one or more components. These items will go into producing the finished good. This is a great way to keep track of inventory of your raw materials/components. When you start the Work Order process, each step will have a status, which can have the following values:

Waiting: Components need to be allocated. You can enter quantities directly into the Allocated column of the Component List, or use ‘Pick All’ or ‘Pick Select’ to automatically allocate components based on available quantities.  All components must be allocated before status can be changed to ‘In Production,’ unless you have the ‘Allow status forcing’ option selected in Preferences.

Ready: All components have been allocated and the step is ready to be placed into production.

In Production: The step is currently is being worked on.

Finished: Production is finished for the step.

You can also assign time to these steps. Maybe you are adding labor cost, and you want to be able to track how long it takes to complete each step so you can add the correct amount to labor.

You will aslo have a number of Work Order related commands on the toolbar. You can get to these commands by the activities drop down menu. Let me go over them with you:

Finish all: This will automatically finish all steps, provided there's enough allocated inventory. Additionally, you must have Status Skipping enabled in your Work Order Preferences for this command to work.

Restart: Starts the Work Order over from scratch, setting the Produced field back to zero and resetting all steps back to Ready status.

Split: If you have already completed at least one assembly (and have the inventory available to produce the remaining total ordered), you can split off the remaining unfinished assemblies into a new Work Order so that you can bill for the ones you've already produced.

Pick Selected: For the selected step, All Orders automatically fills the Allocated column with available stock.

Pick All: For every step in the work order, All Orders automatically fills the Allocated column with available stock.

Flatten: In the case of a multi-level Bill of Materials, you might want to do a single Work Order, listing all the components of the entire hierarchy as though it were a single Bill of Materials. This button allows you to do that. In order for the Flatten function to drill down to the components of the sub-assembly, the sub-assembly must be parked as a ‘Phantom BOM’.

Drill Down: In the case of a multi-level Bill of Materials,  Drill Down will to automatically create the chain of work orders for the top level item's sub-assemblies.   All work orders that are part of the chain will have the same Drill Down Ref being the work order # of the top level item.   You can filter the work order list to by Drill Down Ref to view only the work orders in the drill down chain.

Create Linked Purchase Orders: Opens the Reorder Analysis tool, allowing you to place orders for components required directly from the Work Order.

Create Linked Work Orders: Allows you to create related work orders in order to produce components that are sub-assemblies.

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Lot/Serial Numbers

January 29, 2016 at 9:20 AMThomas Riemann

Hello, and welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog! I hope you guy's enjoyed some of those articles about our fantastic program, All Orders. If you haven't checked those out yet and are still on the fence about making the switch to All Orders, make sure you scroll to the previous blog post!

For today's post, I will be addressing Lot/Serial #'s. Tracking Lot and Serial #'s allows you to specifically track the movement of a particular item within your inventory. A lot of companies in the food industry and electronics will use Lot and Serial #'s. Normally, you wouldn't be able to differentiate between an item that was purchased a year ago and an identical item that was purchased 2 days ago. That's why its important to assign your items with a Lot or Serial number, so you can effectively track that item's movement. Another great thing about Lot/Serial #'s is that it will allow you to also track expiration dates.

In order to enable Lot/Serial #'s in All Orders, proceed to the Item Editor and select the "other" tab. You will see a check box "This item has lots or serial numbers. Make sure that is checked to assign a lot number to it. If you already have some Lot or serial numbers for items, but they are not in All Orders, you can use our LotSerialNumber.xls import sheet to get them into the system. You can find all our import sheets by following this patch in your machine: C:\Program Files\NumberCruncher\All Orders\Import. These are some of the very basic's of the Lot/Serial # feature in All Orders. In future blog post's I will be diving deeper into some of the basic features in All Order's.

Well, that is all for today. I hope you guy's have a great weekend! Remember if you have any questions, head over to our website. As always you can always e-mail customer support at support@numbercruncher.com or call us (866) 278-6243.

All Orders!

January 22, 2016 at 10:44 AMThomas Riemann

Welcome back! Hope everyone had a great week! I know some of you guy's that live up north are getting hammered with some pretty intense snow. I feel your pain, I was born and raised is South New Jersey so I know how a snow storm's can destroy a mood. I guess since you guy's will be snowed in all weekend, you might want some good reading material. Well, recently in the past 2 weeks, All Orders has been featured on http://www.intuitiveaccountant.com. They have written a great article about the All Orders program that I would love for you guy's to check out.

That isn't all, All Orders is now on appcenter.intuit.com. Click the link to see an over view of the All Orders program and how it works with Quickbooks. Take a look at our pricing, as you can see we offer training hours based off how many user's. We also include unlimited technical support and software upgrades. To find out more about our program please visit us, NumberCruncher.

Well that is all for today's blog. Make sure you check out those links so you can read up on all our key features! Next week, I will be back talking about some of our smaller features within the All Orders software. Get ready to learn about Lot/Serial #'s on Next weeks Blog! Everyone, if you are getting hit with snowy weather, please be safe out there!. Till Next week! Farewell!

 

All Order's Basic Feature's

January 15, 2016 at 8:06 AMThomas Riemann

Welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog! Happy New year!! Ok, I am a bit late on wishing you guy's that but better late than never. I hope this year goes even better for your company then last year did, even if last year was a great year. Hopefully by now you have purchased the All Orders program and we are contributing to that success. If that's the case, please post a comment and tell us how the All Orders has helped your business advance!

Today I would like to focus on some of the key features used in the All Orders program. Most of you know about how easy it is to create a Sales Order and a Purchase Order in All Orders. Those 2 features are much easier to use in All Order then it is to use in Quickbooks. Let's talk about a key feature in All Orders that Quickbooks does not have, the Work Order. If there's a production aspect of your business, and you're creating new Items out of singular components, then you are likely to grow familiar with this feature. What that means is, the work order allows you to take your raw materials and create a finish product. How does that benefit your company? This will allow you to keep track of the raw material inventory levels. Quickbooks does not offer anything like that. Another cool feature that the work order will allow you to track of are the steps. You will be able to add steps to the work order allowing you to see exactly where the finished product is in the production. If you build a work order from a sales order, the steps will allow you to inform the customer exactly where the product is. If you are not familiar with the Work Order process, please head over to our support page where our video tutorials will give you the basic overview on how to use the Work Order.

If you would like a member of the NumberCruncher team to train you remotely on any of these features, Please let us know by calling (866) 278-6243. If you are still in the phase where you are not sure the All Order software is right for your company, you can always try the software out for 30 days completely free! Signup for your free trial TODAY!

Well, that's all for today. Everyone Enjoy your weekend! Always remember the NumberCruncher Support team is here for you when you need us!


TOM


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How to Perform a Bin Move

December 31, 2015 at 9:04 AMThomas Riemann

 

Hello! I hope you and your family had a great holiday! I know I enjoyed my first Florida Christmas! It was great to go to the beach on Christmas day! Anyway, back to things at hand. Last week we talked the basics about bins. Today, I would like to address how to perform a new "Bin Move". A bin move is a great feature and I find a lot of our clients use this frequently. 

If you need to transfer qty from bin to bin, you can use our newest feature called a Bin move. You can start a new bin move from the Warehouse menu – New Bin Move. This will prompted the bin transfer screen. Enter the location and the date of the transfer. There are 2 ways to move your bin quantities, you can move one item at a time or Move an entire bin. To move one item at a time select select that option. This selection will allow you to move a specific item and quantity. Select the bin from and the bin to and select one item, lot/serial #’s and enter the qty to transfer. One note to make, when you select your from bin, the total quantity in the bin (of all items) is listed.

Once you have selected the item, the total quantity for that item in that bin is listed. You can use that to determine the qty that you will transfer. Click add and your entry will be listed below. Repeat the steps for multiple items. The second way is to Move an Entire bin, you can do this by selecting the Move entire bin option. This will move all items and quantities from on bin to another. Select the bin you will transfer from and the bin you will transfer to. The total inventory in that bin will be selected, Click add and it will list all of the items located in that bin.

You can delete the line items that you do not want to transfer by clicking the red X on the line item.

Lastly, you can click Create Transfers and a new Quantity Adjustment screen will open. Remember no quantity is adjusted, you are just moving one bin to another.

In my years of being a Warehouse Supervisor, we had over 200 bins. The inventory warehouse software that we were using at the time did not have a feature like All Orders does. This feature would have made life a lot easier for me. Remember if you have any questions or concern's the NumberCruncher team is here for you. Please give our customer support line a call - (866) 278-6243. You can send us an email also - support@numbercruncher.com. Have a great New Year!! Here's to 2016! Best of luck!




Tom

Bins

December 24, 2015 at 8:48 AMThomas Riemann

 

Hey guy's! Welcome to the NumberCruncher Blog, Thursday Edition! Firstly, Happy Holidays from NumberCruncher team! We hope you and your employees have a great holiday weekend and spend some quality time with your families! Now, in my past 2 blogs we focused on Locations. Now we are going to focus on features within the locations, Bins.

Within the all orders program, we have a unique feature called Bins. This allows you to create a location within locations, allowing you to easily pinpoint the location of the item. If you have a huge warehouse with multiple aisles of product, this would be a key feature for you. A bin does not have to be a physical bin. A bin can be any place of storage, from an actual bin to a shelf or a crate.

For each item that is a Part or an Assembly you can specify a default bin.

When you add items to inventory (Receiving Purchase orders, completing a Work Order) the qty will automatically go into the designated bin. If you leave this area blank, it will go into the default bin. You can change which bin an item is either added to or pulled from on any transaction. You can also split qty between multiple bins in the same location. From the line item of a transaction, click details icon then click bins. Click in any column to enter in the desired bin, and then enter the quantity.

On a transaction where the qty is being decreased aka ship doc and you are not sure which bin the product is on you can click “get available” that will bring up a dialog box.

The bin feature is very useful for your warehouse staff, so make sure you take advantage of the easy to use feature within All Orders. Well, I hope you have learned something from this blog post and again I hope your company can run a little bit smoother. As I always mention, make sure you check out all our support tutorials. Remember if you have any questions or concern's the NumberCruncher is here for you. Please give our customer support line a call - (866) 278-6243. You can send us an email also - support@numbercruncher.com. Hope everyone has a safe and wonderful holiday!

Performing a Location Transfer

December 18, 2015 at 9:10 AMThomas Riemann

Hello everyone! Welcome back to the blog! Well it's been another great week here in the NumberCruncher office! We hope your company had a great week as well. As you know it's Friday, time for another blog update!  Today I will be talking about how to Perform a Location Transfer.

This feature is used when a business operates from multiple locations. From time to time your company may need to transfer Inventory to and from locations. This is sort of like a Shipping doc only you are the sender and the recipient.

To Create a Location Transfer, select the Warehouse Menu and then select New Location Transfer. Another way of doing this is from your company home screen, Select Location Transfer.

First step is to choose the Location you are shipping from. After that is selected you can now select the location you are shipping to. You can use the “Activate From” and “Activate To” to specify a location for entering Item specific info, such as bins or lot/serial #.

You can now select the items you will be transferring; you must enter in an accurate quantity amount. Only those items in stock will appear in the drop down list. Next, select your shipping method, a ship doc (if applicable), Number of packages, and the total weight.

Just one more step before we can save this location transfer, you must put in the transaction date (if other than today). After those steps are complete, you can now finish by clicking he save button. You can print the transfer log or even email it.

That is how you will typically perform a Location Transfer within the All Orders program. As always, I invite you to check out some of our video tutorials. If you are new to the program, they will give you the jump start needed to begin using All Orders. Make sure you check them out! If you are having some issues or just have question's about anything related to Location Transfers or All Orders in general, please give our customer support line a call - (866) 278-6243. You can send us an email also - support@numbercruncher.com. I hope everyone has a great weekend! Enjoy!


TOM

Multiple Warehouse Locations

December 8, 2015 at 11:04 AMThomas Riemann

Hey Guy's! Happy Friday! Hope everyone had an outstanding week! Firstly, welcome back to the NumberCruncher blog. Before we get into our next blog topic, take a second and head over to the NEW NumberCruncher website. We redesigned it and we think it looks great. Tell us what you think about it in the comments below! Thanks for taking a look!

Ok, so lets talk little about Locations.

A Location can be anything you store inventory in. An example of a location may be your main warehouse or another warehouse located in a different state. It also may be a customer that you drop ship to.

You can access the Location tab either from the company home screen or Warehouse – New Location. This will allow you to add new facility locations as needed.  All you have to do is enter a Location name and then specify whether you would like it to be listed as available.

The first tab you will see is “The address Information tab” this is pretty much self explanatory, this is the address of the location. If it is a customer, say for a drop ship, you can copy the customers or vendors address by click the Copy from Customer or Copy from Vendor. That will bring up a menu where you can select the customer and its address.

The next tab is called Bins. This allows you to create a location within a location. This will help out your shippers while they are picking the product. You can place the bin number on the pick ticket so they know exactly where the item is located within your warehouse. This doesn’t have to be a physical bin it could be and place where the product is being stored. To add a new bin, click the line below Default. Next, type in the name of the bin of your choice. You can now select if the bin is available or you can mark if this is your default bin.

If you need to delete a bin, all you have to do is click the delete button.

Save an close and you are finished.

That pretty much sum's up Locations. I hope this helped your company understand Locations a bit better. As always, I invite you to check out some of our video tutorials. They are a great help to new comers to All Orders. Make sure you check them out. Of course if you have some issues or question's about anything related to Locations or All Orders in general, please give our customer support line a call - (866) 278-6243. You can send us an email also - support@numbercruncher.com. I hope everyone has a great weekend! Enjoy!


Tom

Creating a New Quantity Adjustment

December 2, 2015 at 11:51 AMThomas Riemann

Hey Guys! Welcome back to the NumberCruncher Blog!!! It's Tom from the NumberCruncher team again! Last Friday we talked about how to "Perform Inventory Counts" within the All Orders program. If you are struggling doing inventory, go check that link out and read our last blog post. Maybe that's not what your looking for, maybe your company doesn't need help doing inventory counts. You might just need to Adjust some Inventory due to a trade show where you gave away some Inventory as prizes. Or your company had a fire and due to that fire some inventory was lost in the process. The perfect tool for this in All Orders is called an "Adjustment".

To start a New Quantity Adjustment, you can do 1 of 2 things, Warehouse – New Qty Adjustment or from the company home screen select Adjustments. After you have selected one of those 2 options you now can select a location for the adjustment.

Once that is selected, you now need to choose an account. Keep in mind the account you choose should NOT be an inventory asset account. If desired, you can also choose a Quickbooks class but this is not a requirement.

Next you will want to start adding items into the form. If your company uses bar code scanners, you can place your cursor in the bar code area and scan your barcode. You could also type the item name in the same box and hit tab. If you are not using the barcode tool, you can choose the item by using the drop down menu. Simply click the first blank line in the Item column of the list. Now, you can adjust the quantity of the Item in the QTY field. Use negative values to indicate lost inventory. If needed, you can adjust the date of the adjustment in the upper right had corner of this form. Check “only adjust” in NumberCruncher if you do not want these adjustments to reflect in Quickbooks.

Well, that pretty much sum's up how to create a Quantity Adjustment. If you are still having trouble, don't forget to check out some of our Tutorial videos. Well guys, that's it for today's post. I will be uploading blog's like this every Friday. If you have any topic's you would like for me to blog about, feel free to contact me directly at tom@numbercruncher.com. I will be sure to listen to all of your suggestions. As always our NumberCruncher support team is always here for any other question's you may have. Please contact us at anytime. Thank you guys for reading!!! I will see you next Friday!!

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Performing an Inventory Count

November 27, 2015 at 2:04 PMThomas Riemann

 

Hello, Welcome to the NumberCruncher blog! My name is Tom and I am the newest member of NumberCruncher. I have worked in a warehouse before as the Inventory Control Supervisor, so I know the pains of doing Inventory. For most of you, it’s that time of year to get those inventory counts in. I know this is a very time consuming process and it could be in the middle of the busy holiday season. Please do not get discouraged, the NumberCruncher team is here. Today let’s focus on how to perform an inventory count.

When your company is performing a new inventory count, the tool to use in All Orders is called a Count. To start a new count click Warehouse - New Qty Count. You can also go to the company home screen and Click on the Count icon. Once you are on the Count screen, you can now select the location. After selecting the Location, the quantities for all the items within that location as of the count date will appear.

Some points to keep in mind while doing this count are:

-Counts are location specific, if you have more than one location you will need to create a count for each

-Only one count per location can be opened at a time.

-You cannot change the location or the count date once the count has been saved.

-If you leave a New Qty blank that means the item has not been counted

-There is one row for each item, bin, lot/serial #

-The current qty is qty on hand NOT the quantity available

Once you have added the location and count date, you can now enter the correct counted qty for each item. For each row you can either enter the new qty or the difference. When you have finished the count click Activities – Finalize. That will create an adjustment for all items having quantity differences. If an item, bin, lot/serial # is not on the count, Click Activities – Add item. Once the item is added it will appear on the bottom of the list. If you are you using at bar code scanner, you can scan in the items, bin or lot/serial#. By default All Orders expects the first scan to be the Item, you can change this by toggling the `scan by’ options. Lastly, you can use the filter tab to allow you to shorten the number of items shown on the grid.

I hope this has helped your company breath a little easier performing an Inventory count. Thank you so much for reading! If you have any questions regarding inventory counts or anything regarding the All Orders software, please do not hesitate to contact us. The NumberCruncher support team is always here to help! As always, have a great week!

E-mail: support@numbercruncher.com

Phone: (866) 278-6243

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