We're a truck body manufacturer. Sometimes we invoice the customer just for the body & install (example being where the customer supplies their own truck) and other times we invoice them for the entire package including the truck itself (where we would then pass the money on to the supplying truck dealer). In either case we want to use VISUAL to keep track of every truck on our lot and we're looking for the best way to accomplish this.
Some random thoughts:
Accounting
While we do mark the trucks up some when we're the ones supplying them, it's nothing significant. In a perfect world we would choose to not have to ever invoice the trucks themselves but in most cases that's the way the deals work out. We view the income/loss of the trucks no differently than most companies would view freight income (charges to a customer) and freight cost (to ship out to a customer). Because of this I'm wondering if it makes sense to set up a product code where the revenue account for the product code would point to an expense account and the COGS account would point to a 2nd expense account. Example: Revenue - Truck Income Expense - Truck Cost. This would keep the revenue from the trucks out of our gross revenue reports.
We always invoice the truck and the install/body separately. This is kind of a pain because it would be nice to have the truck right in the work order for the install but again, we don't want the revenue of the truck mixed with the revenue of the products we're actually manufacturing/installing.
Inventory Management - This is the primary debate
Trucks come on to our lot a few ways. Customers supply their own trucks (rare), customer places an order/deposit with us where we then order a truck for them through a truck dealer. The truck shows up months later and when it does we begin to install the truck body (somewhat frequent - truck is ordered for a specific job), and lastly we have our own inventory of the trucks sitting on our lot ready for a customer to purchase. Some stocked without a truck body and some with a truck body. In the last case we never actually pay for the trucks and they are consigned to us by the truck dealers. Once the unit sells both parts get their money.
Ideas for managing the inventory -
- New part number for every truck
- Pro - Exact specifications can be kept for each unit (We might have 10 F550's and none of them may be exactly alike)
- Pro - Easily manage pricing for each unit. Pricing reliability when added to a sales order (assuming it was set correctly when new part number was created)
- Pro - Each unit would have it's own doc reference in part maintenance to record dealer quote, dealer spec sheet etc
- Pro - Allows for issuing PO's to truck dealers and tracking receipt
- Con - Creation of new part number that will only ever be used one time (right now this would be around 100 a year)
- Con - New part trace profile created for each unit for VIN # (considered putting VIN in part description but setting up a part trace profile with a required entry ensures a VIN number is associated when the truck is received)
- One single part number for all trucks
- Would set up one part trace profile with the main label being VIN, use remaining labels for OWNER (truck dealer name or customer name), YEAR-MAKE-MODEL, BODY MODEL, BODY SERIAL (the last two would be left blank when the trucks are received and filled in once a body is assigned to it. This would be our only way of knowing if the unit had a body yet or not)
- From there would be able to look at on hand quantities for all trucks and in Material Planning Window would be able to go to Trace Details to search one of the 4 other label attributes.
- Pro - Allows for issuing PO's to truck dealers and tracking receipt
- Con - Less visibility and search ability for each truck
- Con - With each unit having different specs and costs - customer price, costs and spec sheets would need managed outside of VISUAL (or possibily within the doc reference of the trace id). Would require manual entry of pricing when added to sales order which could lead to errors
Let me know any thoughts, ideas and opinions.
Thanks,
Zach
