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Recovering WIP dollars for job closed accidentally

February 12th, 2014 No comments

If someone accidentally closes a job that was in process, all of the costs that were in WIP will be written off to the item’s inventory adjustment account if actual-costed or to variance accounts if standard-costed and the WIP buckets on the job will be cleared. These WIP-clearing entries will be written to the SF Dist journal. You can change the job’s status back to Released in order to continue processing but doing so will not put the written-off cost back into WIP.

The best (and possibly only) way to do handle this is to issue a non-item master material to the job for the total cost that had been written off. When you do so, you can enter the cost at which to issue the item and the offsetting account to WIP. The detailed steps are as follows (read them all thoroughly before attempting this):

1) Find the amounts that were written off.

Find the journal transactions in the SF Dist journal which were created when the job was closed. These would have a reference of the job number prefaced by "INV JCLS" if the job was closed on the job screen or "INV JFIN" if it was closed via a job transaction. There may be up to five entries to the job’s WIP accounts (material, labor, fixed ovhd, variable ovhd and outside). If the parent item on the job has a cost type of Actual, the offsetting account would have been inventory adjustment. If it was Standard, the offsetting accounts would be material usage variance and/or routing variance.

2) Issue a non-item master item to the job.

Enter a material transaction for an item that is not in the item master and which represents the process such as "RECOVERED WIP COST". You will be informed that the item is not in the item master and that it is not in the job’s BOM at which point you should elect to have it added.

3) Issue it at the written off cost.

In the process of issuing this item, you will be prompted for the cost at which it should be issued. In the five cost buckets, enter the amount that had been written off to each WIP account into the appropriate bucket.

4) Enter the account to which the amounts had been written off.

When prompted for the Other Account, if the item is actual-costed, enter the inventory adjustment account that was hit when the job was closed. That will then reverse the entry that was made to inventory adjustment when the job was closed. If the item is standard costed, both material usage and routing variance may have been hit. If only one of the two were hit, enter that account into the Other Account field. If both were hit, the easiest thing to do would be to enter one of the two accounts and then enter a general journal transaction which reverses the appropriate amount into the other account.

5) IMPORTANT: If the parent item on the job is standard costed, go to the job material record created for the WIP recovery and change the quantity per assembly from zero to 1.  If it is left at the default of zero, its entire value will be written off to material usage variance when the job is closed.   Also, make sure the quantity is expressed as per Lot rather than per Unit.

At that point, all of the costs will be back on in the WIP accounts in GL and the job’s WIP buckets. Also, the amounts will have been reversed from the accounts into which had orignally been cleared.