Inventory

Most inventory transactions in NetSuite tend to be internal in nature. They include activities such as inventory adjustments and transfers, and we’ll look at them in this video. In addition to Inventory there is also the concept of items, and we will cover items in chapter five. Inventory in NetSuite typically are the things that you sell to customers, or will assemble into what is sold to customers. In some instances of NetSuite, you will also see inventory used to track company assets, but I don’t recommend this. If we want to take a look at what we have in Inventory right now, we can do this by running the, Current Inventory Status, report. This report is located under Reports, then Inventory/Items, and clicking Current Inventory Status. We haven’t talked about reports until now, and we have a chapter dedicated to them a bit later, but this is probably the most important report you can run to get an overview of what inventory sits where. This is also an out of the box report, so unless something was done to remove it, you should have it. We can see the items and their descriptions in the left most columns. We also have columns for how many we have on hand, in transit, on order, etc., and we can see the labels for those columns along the top. These are grouped based on the location, so in this instance we have location for San Francisco and Boston. Now that we are familiar with what our report says we have in inventory, let’s take a look at a few other things we can do. If we need to adjust inventory for a specific item, we can do that by going to Transactions, then Inventory, and Clicking on Adjust Inventory. Here we can create an inventory adjustment. I first need to select a Subsidiary that this adjustment is for, before I can enter many of these other fields. Now I can select an adjustment account, and this will usually be an expense account that is setup for inventory adjustments. I’ll use this, 6005 account, which is for my inventory expenses. I can now select the items I want to adjust inventory for. I’ll choose this first item and select a location. Now let’s say that I found two of these, hiding behind some boxes in our warehouse. I will enter 2, in the, adjust quantity by, field here, and select add. I could have just as easily decremented the quantity by entering a negative number. After filling in any more information that I need to, such as the Department, Class, Adjustment Location, etc., I can save the Inventory Adjustment. If we were to rerun the Inventory Status report we looked at earlier, or even look at the item directly we would see the quantity had been adjusted. This method works well enough for one off adjustments, but what if we needed to create multiple adjustments. We could do that through the inventory worksheet instead. If we again go to Transactions, then Inventory, we have another option of, Adjust Inventory Worksheet. Here we can start to create our worksheet. Let’s again pick a subsidiary, I’ll choose the Honeycomb manufacturing subsidiary this time. We can now select the account we want to use, and the location. Once we have these fields selected, we can see the adjustments subtab become populated. Here we can adjust our inventory to reflect what we really have on hand. You can do a few other things too like select the date you want this adjustment to take place, and decide if it is going to be the first or last transaction of the day. This is pretty straight forward, and all you would need to do is populate the fields, for the items you wished to change, and save the worksheet. When they find out about this worksheet, many warehouse managers, start using this to do their inventory counts. This does work, however there is a better way to do something like that, with the aptly named Inventory Count, found again, under the Transactions and Inventory menus. Let’s take a look. First we need to create an inventory count. Here we again need to select the Subsidiary and Location. We also need to select the Account we will use to post the adjustments to. Right now, I only see one item that needs to have its inventory counted. This is due to how inventory counts work. On each Item, I can specify how often I want to count the item, for each location. Once I have set this up, the system keeps track of when I have performed an inventory count, what items I have counted, and what items I need to still count. Let me open this item in a new tab and show you what I mean. I’ll put this into edit mode so you can see what is going on. If we scroll down here to the bottom, and over to the right, we see the, next count date, and the, count interval, in days. This means that when I set items up, I can set up dates when they need to be counted. We will touch on this when we cover items in a later movie, for now I am just going to close this tab. I’ll select the item and click submit, and my inventory count has been submitted. Normally you will select more than a single item, but this is just for demonstration purposes. When I am ready I can start my count with the start count button. Doing this performs a sort of accounting lock, on the transactions, that helps to guarantee accuracy, when you are counting items whose inventory may fluctuate rapidly in time. If I click Edit I can start entering the count quantity for all the items I decided to count. Once I have entered the information, the quantities of what I counted, I can click save. Now I can complete the count by clicking Complete Count. Like many other transactions, now that this is saved, the count can be approved or rejected, by a user with the appropriate permissions. If I didn’t want or need to do inventory counts in this manner. That is if I didn’t need the transaction isolation, this type of inventory count provides, I could just as easily go to Transactions, then Inventory and select Enter Inventory Count. Here, I would enter my standard information for the Subsidiary, Location, and other fields. Then I would start entering items that I had performed the inventory count on, along with their relevant information down here. Once I was done I would save this and it would apply immediately. There is one other main type of transaction, that is used often, that relates to inventory; the inventory transfer. These are what they sound like, moving inventory from one location to another, and they can be found under Transactions, Inventory, and Transfer Inventory. If I choose a subsidiary, most of the rest of the fields become available to select from. The most important fields are the, From Location, and To Location. They tell the system where you are moving inventory from and to. In this case, San Francisco and Boston. Now I can choose some items and how many of each I want to transfer. I’ll just add this single line. If I click save, I have now transferred inventory from one location to another. This is the quick and simple way to transfer inventory from one location to another. There is a different way that is more process based as well, and that is the transfer order. Transfer Orders can be found under the same Transactions and Inventory menu. They work a lot like Purchase Orders. The steps usually involve, creating the transfer order, having the transfer order approved, then receiving the transfer order. You can customize this process so that the transfer order has any number of approval steps, and you can create approvals for the receipt as well. We are not going to go through a transfer order and receipt here, but if you watched the video on purchases earlier in this chapter, the same information applies. Now that you are familiar with Adjustments, Counts and Transfers you should have the skills you need to manage your inventory.