Taking Stock of Your Accounts

Most accounting systems can handle general business needs without too much fuss. As long as your business sells straightforward products using a simple pricing model, then it's probably OK to stick with a run of the mill accounting system.

But what if your products have:

• multiple units of measure
• serial and lot tracking with expiry dates
• different costs at each location
• more than one stock keeping bin location in each warehouse
• barcodes for each packaging unit
• the need to track costs by FIFO, Weighted Average Cost and Standard Costs
• more than one dimension such as Colour, Size, Season, Width and Depth and the pricing varies for each of these attributes
  
• Volume Pricing or Discounts by date range for both Sales and Purchases
• Complex cost calculations that include foreign and local freight charges, agent handling fees, duty, warehousing fees, insurance all allocated on the basis of weight, value or cubic volume
  

If you're using a run of the mill accounting system and your business has complex stock requirements, you're probably using spreadsheets and word processing and many error prone manual procedures just to get your invoices out the door.

More information: Axsapt

Managing the Production of Food

Some of Axsapt's customers are well known Australian manufacturers of mass produced food products such as Cakes, Pickles and Chocolates.

What are the special needs of these sorts of industries?

• The most important from a health point of view is traceability of all products produced from a single production run or batch. If a product recall becomes necessary, it's important to identify all customers who have purchased the faulty product. This extends right down to the components used in the recipe as well.
• Raising purchase orders to suppliers to ensure that raw material components arrive just before needed so they are in peak condition. Perishability and Local availability are the key factors that determine the lead time of delivery.
• Shelf life/Use-by Dates needs to be recorded on both raw materials and the finished product. This will help the warehouse pick the oldest products first to minimise the likelihood of stocking expired products.
• Keeping stock levels at optimum levels by predicting factory production based on seasonal sales forecasts, actual orders received, current stock in the warehouse and the practical production capacity of the machinery and labour force.

Selecting a good Manufacturing System can be quite onerous as you must map the production process including all the stages of manufacture. You need to consider stock locations, outsourced manufacture, phantom bills (such as bread dough) which exists only as a temporary component in the process, resource capacity, wastage, the production of by-products etc.

More information: Axsapt