Allocating Inventory to a Job

Thanks so much for the reply.   That does solve the mystery.... the functionality to transfer inventory items to a particular job does not exist currently in QB.

Hopefully it will be a function added in future editions! :-)

I can see the benefit of being able to transfer inventory items to a particular job will aid you in running your construction company with QuickBooks Desktop (QBDT), @MikeyB. That's why I'm here to share further details about this.

We take your suggestions for transferring inventory items to a job as an opportunity on which area of the product's feature we need to improve on. With this, I encourage you to send feedback or product recommendation.

Your valuable feedback will be forwarded and reviewed by our Product Development team to help improve your experience while using the program. Here's how:

1. Go to the Help menu.
2. Choose  Send Feedback Online.
3. Click on Product Suggestion.
4. Click on the drop-down for Type of Feedback and select Product Suggestion.
5. Select the Product Area.
6. Then enter your thoughts and suggestions.
7. Once done, select Send Feedback.

I've attached screenshots below for your reference.

Also, I'm adding this article to further guide you in managing your business growth and inventory transactions in QBDT: QuickBooks Help Articles for Inventory Management. It also includes related articles about bills, payments, and inventory values, to name a few.

I'm all ears if you have other inventory concerns and tracking job costs in QBDT. You can drop your comment below, and I'll gladly help. Take care always, @MikeyB. 

@MikeyB 

Inventory management features in QBD are only suitable for retail/wholesale/manufacturing companies. I am not sure they will create an additional feature for a construction company. Consider having a construction management app to integrate with your QBD. You may generate a report like this one later.

@Fiat Lux - ASIA 

Thanks for the reply.   The report you posted is essentially what I am looking to generate by job, however it appears that QBDT has the limitation of not being able to allocate inventory directly to a particular Customer:Job.... when there is a fixed fee contractual pricing arrangement in place.    The program wants to continually invoice for the inventory parts allocated, rather than just track the COGS allocation.

I've remitted a suggestion request within QB to the technical development team to see if this can be addressed in future version of the program.

Thanks again for your reply

Have you tried using the "Adjust Quantity" transaction to post the inventory items used on your job?  If you assign the adjustment to your specific job, it should do exactly what you're wanting:  reduce the inventory item levels and charge the cost of the inventory items to your specified job.   Just make sure when running your Job Profitability report to change the filters so that it picks up "All" accounts, not just "Income/Expense" accounts.

I have the same problem in our cabinet manufacturing business. I want the Job Profitability report to show the pieces of plywood that we take from inventory for the job. The only thing I've come up with, is to go back to the original vendor invoice and reflect that 2 pieces of plywood were for a certain customer. Very burdensome. The reports are useless as they are right now because we don't know the Actual Cost of the job.

Hello, our accountant has set up two separate chart of accounts. Inventory and CIP for each item. When inventory is purchased it’s posted to the inventory account, we keep track on a spreadsheet system to track items pulled  from inventory, then manually do a journal entry from inventory to CIP account for that item. Once the job is completed and billed out, another journal entry is made from CIP to COGS. A lot of entries and recording but it works.

We are a construction company too.  I have set up the inventory item to hit WIP for both Cost and Sales.  I have also set up an Inventory Transfer item code that also post to WIP.  In the invoice I charge the customer for the inventory and then enter in the inventory transfer item code as a credit to create a zero invoice.  The net result is a reduction to inventory and an increase to WIP for the customer.  Perfect!

This does work great for increasing the WIP account and reducing inventory, but when I look at the JOB COST DETAIL report by this customer it is showing a debit and credit and the net job cost as zero.  Is there something that I am missing or a work around that will allow me to see the cost increase to this customer job? 

Thanks for joining the thread, SEK07122022.

I understand how critical it is for you to see the cost increase for each customer job. Currently, it isn't possible to see the increase in cost per customer's job.

You may manually enter the data after exporting the Job Cost Detail report to Excel as a workaround. To do this, click the Excel dropdown and select Create New Worksheet.

I'm also adding this article to learn more about running and customizing reports in QuickBooks Desktop: Understand reports.

You can memorize your report if you wish to save your current customization. Check out this resource for a complete guide: Memorize report.

You're welcome to post again if you have further questions about tracking job costs. We're here to help you.

I've found that if I make a Job of the original Customer Job, then I can get a Job Profitability report from the customer page that will show inventory used against that job.

So it's Smith:Smith - everything then is coded to the Job name and I can get a good profit report.

Another way to accomplish this is to create a Sales Order rather than a job, at least for the stocked inventory items.  Each item goes on the SO line with a zero selling price.  Associate the job number to the SO, and it should appear in the Job Profitability report once you create the no charge invoice to the customer from the SO.  Of course, you do not send this invoice to the customer.  An additional nicety of this activity is that all of the quantities you put on Sales Orders will also show as Allocated Quantities in your inventory item screens.  This can be helpful if you want to maintain a certain stock of of some commonly-used items. 

Great idea with using Sales Orders and zeroing out cost.  Question, how do you track Use Tax per the items you transferred out of inventory?  Thanks!!

Hi

it is possible as long as you are doing costing and not selling inventory items. Must create some account ledger and items to work that way. Once it is set it is easy to allocate multiple inventory items to multiple jobs. 

Agree with this.  Creating SO's seemed to be the only way to relieve inventory to actual sales.  

It's really kinda crazy to me though that there is no inventory allocation module.  

I am trying to solve this problem too.... came up with this...
To allocate inventory to lump sum per quote jobs.
I invoiced the job as usual "Total Per Quote $40,000.00" and presented it to the customer for payment.
I then created another invoice listing the inventory parts and quantities totaling $8,000.00
I created a discount item called "inventory discount" that is "non tax" linked to my sales account.
I enter $8000.00 to remove the increased sales created by the inventory asset moving to the COGS Material account and there by increasing my sales account on this invoice.
I have another discount item called "inventory sales tax discount" that is also marked "non tax" linked to my sales account.
I enter the amount of sales tax $800.00. This now makes my invoice zero 0.
The way to think about it is that technically the customer already paid this invoice in the lump sum per quote amount. The customer will never see this invoice. You moved your inventory from assets to expense and hit the profitability report for that job. AND the sales tax is waiting for you to pay in your Sales tax liability account.

This is how we are going to do it.... if you see any flaws please let me know.... all my testing seemed to affect every account the right way.

Would you mind giving further instructions on how you completed this? I have tried and can't figure out how to have the value show in projects while also being deducted from inventory qty and assets.

Hello. I have achieved this before by creating Sales Receipts with the Job selected and the line items listed. However, be sure to place $0 as the price on the Sales Receipts. This will in effect attribute the whole cost of the item towards COGS and it will show up in your job profitability report. The next limitation I have reached with this is the fact that I cannot fine tune user-permissions to give my inventory staff access to the Sales module without access to sensitive customer and job information. But if you do not have any need for this separation of access, the Sales Receipt is the way to go. I saw someone suggesting a Sales Order in this thread too which is kind of the same concept.