Sales/Purchases: Include a Categories column on Enter Sales/Purchases window

We too are wanting to use Categories on both sales and purchase transactions to track different profit centres.  However, multiple profit centres can exist within one sale or purchase transaction, so the category needs to be applied per line item, not per whole transaction.  Job numbers are already in use to track individual pieces of work (warranty and recall records), so we are currently keeping records external to MYOB to track profit centres.  This means a lot of duplication, and, as with any manual system, it is open to error.

Hence, you get my vote.

Annie

Hi Jennifer,

Unfortunately none of the above suggestions will work for us. The tracking of Categories only needs to occur (at this stage) on our sales transactions. Going through and entering activities and timesheet and timebilling as suggested above would be overkill for our needs. 

Is it not possible at all that MYOB would consider adding another grouping method similar to jobs on sales invoicing? It doesn't have to be Categories you could call it Analysis Code and it will simply allow a user to analays (report) their sales & profit on another level without affecting their inventory and job costing anaylsis.

If I have to setup an inventory item for every employee and every category I will end up with a stupidly massive inventory. 

Thanks,

Sarah

Hi,

Ordinarily I would say Jobs is what you should be using to be able to break down each transaction to different components.

With Jobs you can allocate at the line item level to different Jobs, however with Categiroes Only one can be added to each transaction.  I would not think that Catgories is the way to go to identify things like Call out v Hot water replacement. Categories are more designed to keep track of different Branches or divisions in a business.

You say you are already using Jobs.  Other ways of breaking up the info by jobs into more detail are:

- Use Activity Slips/Time billing to capture both the person performing the task and what Activity they are doing. These can then be allocated to a job. 

- Use Items to Track what work is being done so an Item for Callout , and one for HW replacement. Then you can analyse by Job broken down to the different Income compontents. It sounds like you are using Items to also track the person doing the work? Maybe use SAlesperson for the worker?

- Use Sub jobs - eg Job Header is for the House build and then have a number of sub jobs under each header  Good if you have a smaller number of jobs with a number of segments.

- Use GL to break ups each Job by different components - So if you have say 10 different "types of work" then you could have a Labour GL account down at that level e.g. Callout , HW replacement. then allocate each line to that GL account and allocate to the job. you can then do a JOb P&L that breaks down to that level.

Deciding which is the best for you will depend on the type of jobs you have e.g. small number of large complex jobs, or a large number of small jobs for a large number of clients.  Your MYOB CC will be able to help you work this out.

Reporting?

The other issues is it is fine to do all this work to capture this level of detail however how do you then want to report on it? Combining all of these different elements and getting flexible reports out of standard MYOB can sometimes be a challenge. 

There are a number of Add-on solution that can help you if you choose any of the above options to get really flexible reports by JOb Header, JOb Customer, by Activity Slip, by Category etc.

See http://myob.com.au/addons/category/3/advanced-reporting/

If you would like to know more about some advanced reporting options for MYOB let me know.

Jennifer Kelly CA

Business Intelligence for MYOB

www.BIforMYOB.com

02 8912 4120

Seems every month I have to delete a EFT payment for 100plus invoice. Then delete the payment for the invoice just to change the categories on a few transactions. Then reverse the procedure to record the payment. A major waste of time. When it would be so simple if only it could be changed once you are in the invoice.

Please could you allow the category to be changed after a payment is made. At present the payment (and in some cases the entire bank deposit of multiple payments) has to be deleted in order to amend the category on the invoice or bill. It is possible to change the job number, but changing the category is a big headache! This is now creating issues with an add-on which we want to use as well, which does not record the category, but does record payments. When the sync is done with a payment applied, the payment must be undone in order to insert a category.

Thanks 

PLEASE PLEASE make this possible!!

I really need to be able to add a reportable flag (category) to each line item on a sales invoice. This would be SOOOOOO helpful and I am sure other people would use it. 

I have previously used Sybiz Vision Accounting software and it allows you to assign a sales analysis code (category) to each line item and it is so valueable for reporting.