AugTool Documentation

Items

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In order to transact in Augtool, besides manual journals and some bank allocations, you will need items to transact with. Items can be used in different ways and some are limited in their use depending on where you use them.  For instance, a service type item will not create stock moves nor will they appear on stock reports and you need a predefined item (an allocation item) to use in the bank allocation screen if you want to allocate directly to a chart of account with all the defaults set. 

It is important to configure the various types of items in Augtool correctly.  Please take care in doing this properly. Should you not configure your items correctly,  your data processes and reporting will not serve you. 

Each item also belongs (or needs to belong) to its own category.  Multiple items and multiple types of items can belong to one category but we recommend keeping the same type of item in its own category. Item categories are covered in another section of this guide. 

For an item to exist you need to first create its category,  a chart of account for its cost and income and in some cases for its stock account. In rare cases you will also need to create a liability or asset account for some stocked items that will be used on grvs and delivery notes (this will be explained later but in essence, if you receive a product or service, in some cases you want to raise a liability because you have not yet paid for it). 

There are various tabs you can setup on an item namely its summary, price lists, stock, rules and centres. 

Summary

As seen in the above picture. 

In this section you need to give the item a code and a name.  Codes are alpha numeric. 

It also needs to be assigned to an item type. Should you assign an item to the type Product - Inventory, you will not be able to change it to another type of item later. This is to maintain consistency of stock data within the system. 

You will need to assign an item to a category. If you do not want to use categories, simply create one category called Items and assign all items to this one category. We advice categorising your items as it will improve your reporting. Should you assign an item to the wrong category, and notice this in reports later, you can change the item category and it will then appear in reports differently later. 

Unit of measures need to be setup in your system before you create items (described in another section of the guide). After setting up units of measure, you will need to assign a unit of measure to the item you are creating. 

Tax codes also need to be setup under the Business Unit>>Fiscal Tab before creating items. After your tax codes have been setup, you will need to set the items default tax code. Tax code overrides for selling and buying from tax exempt and other types of organisations is explained in the business units section of the guide. This tax code will automatically pull through to documents that will affect vat/tax (unless an override is applied). 

Sales (income) and Purchase (cost of sales) accounts and Stock accounts for Inventory items will need to be linked to an item.  An item cannot be created without linking it to its relevant sales, purchases and stock chart of accounts. In this case, please ensure you create these accounts on your chart of accounts before you create an item or use multiple tabs in your browser to do this in parallel. 

You can also set the default sales and cost price of the item on the item but do not need to do so. If you do set it here, it will automatically pull through to the transaction you are creating. If you have price lists setup that include the item you are transacting with, the price will be overridden by the price on the price list. With special user rights, a user can also change the price on the document you are transacting with. 

Set the item to active and submit. If you no longer want to see an item on any lookup within the system, set the item to archived. Archived items still appear on reports. 

Price Lists

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Price lists are explained under the price list section of the guide. You can however see what price list an item is linked to on this tab. And you can link an item to a price list and assign a price to it within the price list here.

Stock Setup Screen

Should you create an item that is of type Product - Inventory, this stock tab will become active as you can see above. Once you click on the warehouse the stock setup screen for that warehouse will be shown as you can see below. This is where you can see the stock setups of each warehouse if you use multiple warehouses or just one warehouse if you do not.

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Costing methods:

You can also set your active and secondary costing methods of an item. These costing methods will default to the defaults set on your business unit so that you do not have to fill it out every time. If you do not fill this out, then the system will not post values to the GL for the items used in transactions. This is very important! Please set the defaults for costing methods on your business unit so that the users creating items will not forget to fill this out (It will be automatically filled out for them) 

The active stock method is the one that is used to create financial transactions on your ledger and the secondary method is for reporting purposes only. Some companies want to compare what their stock value would be if they used another costing method. 

If you click on one of the warehouses you will enter the stock setup screen of an item as shown next. 

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The stock setup screen is one of the most important screens in the system for items that are product - inventory. This is where the system stores balances of all the stock transactions and records the actual stock that is on the floor. 

Stock information is created by the stock moves of the system. Please click on the trolly icon of documents to see what stock movements are created when you use an Inventory item. 

The information about an item on this screen includes the following. 

Editable information (click on the edit icon at the top to edit): 

Minimum level - This is the level that the available stock can never go under. The system will stop any transaction that attempts to push the available stock below the minimum. Please note, the available stock is not the actual stock you have on the floor. Some stock on the floor may already be committed to clients. 

Warning level - The system will warn you when you reach this level. 

Reorder level - The system will notify you to re-order if you get to this level. 

Information calculated and created by the system. 

Available - This is the stock that is available to sell. You can work this out by subtracting the OnOrder from the In Warehouse figure. The in warehouse figure is the total stock the system things you have on the floor. Please note, you do not add the OnOrder figure because the available figure is the quantity that you can sell right now (not including what will be received from your purchase orders)

On Hold - This is the total amount of stock that is committed to clients either on a sales order, sales invoice or even still sitting in production. 

On Order - This is the total amount of stock that has been purchased and not received. This figure may come from purchase orders or purchase invoices. 

In Warehouse - This is actually a calculated figure in Augtool and is calculated by adding the available and the OnHold amount together. It is the total stock sitting on the floor. Whatever stock is available to sell and whatever stock is committed but not delivered yet is the actual stock you have. 

Augtool will always track stock for a Product - Inventory item but will not post the stock valuation value to the books in real time if the business unit is not set to Stock Mode. Augative needs to do this for you. See Active stock mode in the guide. 

Back OrderStock

Augtool allow you to create a sales order and sales invoice for stock that you do not have. This is called back order stock. You will need to set your minimum level of stock to below zero (to a chosen backorder stock quantity) if you wish to do this. The system will however never allow your inWarehouse (Actual stock in the warehouse) to go to below zero. Should you wish to sell stock that you do not have yet and the system gives you a stock exceeded error, you will need to change this. 

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Stock setup screen as a a popup on a document

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The stock setup of each item is also visible from the edit screen of documents by clicking on the info button to the right of the line item as seen on the CAN line item above. This info popup will enable users to discover more information about an item before posting the document. Should you have an error or warning on a line item, you can explore more information about that line by clicking on the error message icon. 

Rules

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Linking: 

Any item can be setup to link automatically to an item above it on a document. You can also link an item on a document (such as a sales order) manually but if its linking behaviour is not set on the item itself it will not function in a different way to normal items. 

You can see that you can set an item to link by default (as set in the screen shot above "Yes"). This means that whenever you add this item to a document, it will automatically link to the main item above it. 

The print behaviour defines how the linked item should behave when you print the document such as printing a sales invoice to Pdf to send to a client. Sometimes you want to add additional costs to an invoice for example transportation but you do not want to show that on the invoice you send to your customer. In this case you will choose to hide all on the print behaviour which will consolidate the price (add the price) to the main item so that the client thinks he/she is paying for one item at a certain price but it includes the cost of transport. If you understand this print behaviour, the other print behaviour is self explanatory (portions are hidden or shown).

If you have set the item to inherit units, it will copy the units (quantity) of the main item to itself. 

Recipe Rules

If you have a final product that will be made to stock (not made to order) you should link the final product to the recipe here so that the system can calculate the raw material demand based on production. 

Delivery rules

Some items that are non - inventory such as Product - non inventory, service and transport will normally pull through to Stock type documents (delivery notes, grvs and returns) but will not necessarily create any financials and will not create any stock moves. If you do not want the product to pull through to stock documents and want it to not require a stock document then you set this flag as default to yes.  If you have not done so, you can still do so on the item when you have added it to the document by clicking on the info icon on the item and changing it to Ignore delivery. . 

Many reports in the system are driven by the requirement of items being delivered or received. If you add a service item, transport item or Product - non inventory item to an invoice and this flag is not set to yes, then the reports will tell you that the system is expecting a delivery or grv for the item. 

This rule will also control the fact that these items do not automatically pull through from a source document to the delivery or goods receipt document

Cost and Profit centre Linking

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Once you have setup your centre groups and centres you can force items that get added to a document such as an invoice to have a cost centre. You do this by setting the require centres to yes and then telling the item that it should have at least one centre from the centre group in the Associated Centre Groups. 

Estimate Costing Method and Estimate Cost Price Rule

This is an estimate cost that is used in Sales documents such as Quotes, Sales Orders and Sales Invoices and Production Orders, to assist with on the fly GP calculations. The actual financials are not based on this. This is just a visual cost to guide sales people when putting in a mark-up.

If there is no stock on hand and the weighted average cost is nil, the sales documents would not have a cost for on the fly GP calculations and display. However the sales documents can pull through a cost for GP calculation if an Estimate Costing Method and Estimate Cost Price Rule has been set. The system will first use the Estimate Costing Method and if the Estimate Costing method is nil then it will use the Estimate Cost Price Rule as a fallback.

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We will go through the Estimate costing methods and rules below:

a) None: If None is selected, then the cost will only be nil if none is also selected for the estimate rule. So if none is selected for cost method but an estimate rule other than none was selected then the system will use the Estimate Cost Rule.

b) Default Purchase Price: If this method is selected please ensure that you put in a Default Price is the Summary tab of the Item. If no price is put in the summary tab and Estimate cost price rule is None then this will show nil cost.

c) Weighted Average Overall: If this method is selected please also select an Estimate Cost Rule, as when stock is nil the weighted average will also be nil and in that instance it will use the Estimate cost price rule.

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2. Estimate Cost Price Rule:

a) None: If cost method returns nil and if none is selected here then cost price will be nil.

b) Last Purchase Invoice: This uses the cost per the last Purchase Invoice. This gets saved to the Saved Estimate Cost in the Summary tab of the item. This will get updated every time a Purchase Invoice is posted.

c) Last Production Run: This uses the cost per the last Production Run. The last Production Run uses the weighted average cost. So the input and output items will show the cost per the financials of the last production run. If the item is an output item it's cost will be the sum of the input items weighted average cost. This also gets saved to the Saved Estimate Cost in the Summary tab of the item.

Considerations: 

Saved Estimate Cost Price in Summary Tab: If none is selected for both Estimate Cost Method and Estimate Cost Rule but there is a Saved Estimate Cost Price in the Summary Tab of the Item, the system will use the Saved Estimate Cost Price.

When a rule is selected the rule is not applied to transactions retrospectively, the rule applies to transactions after the rule has been set, for example: If you select Last Production Run for Estimate Cost Price Rule, the rule will use the cost from the Production Runs done after the rule.


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Types of items:

Product - Inventory

Any item that you want to track stock quantity and value for and if you run stock mode, actively update the ledger with the stock value that is transacted. 

These items will automatically pull through from documents to delivery notes, goods receipts, production orders and runs. These items can also be used on any other document that affects stock. 

Product No Inventory, service and transport items will use the Business unit default Non Inventory to be invoiced account if your business unit is in Stock Mode. This means that it will create liabilities within the purchasing process when you create a Goods receipt before you create an invoice. Stating that you have received this Non - Inventory type item but have not raised a creditor with the Purchase Invoice yet. In this case you would need to setup the business unit default for Non Inventory to be received and you need to setup the items cost of sales account to the same account as this control account. 

Product - No Inventory

Any item that you would like to use on and automatically pull through to a delivery note or goods receipt note but not actively track stock with.

The difference between this item and an inventory item is that it can be used in the exact same process as an inventory item but will not update or affect stock. 

Product - Batched

This can be used when you want to use products as a specified group or amount, withing a time-frame.

Service

Items that you can use on a delivery notes or goods receipts note or any other document that affects stock but may not necessarily be used to implicate your financials or stock on these documents. 

These items can be pulled through to documents such as delivery notes and goods receipts for printing purposes. If the item is set under its rules as ignore delivery then it will not expect a delivery nor will it pull through to a deliver note (same for grv's). 

Transportation

Like a service item but is used to track transportation costs in its own report. 

A transportation item will be used to associate a cost to a transporter when a transporter is added on a weighbridge ticket in the sales process. 

Deposit

This can be used for industries that require a deposit such as breakage or security for example: bookings in the hospitality industry.

Adjustment

A special item that is used when adjusting a credit note or debit note. 

You can only add these types of items to credit and debit notes. If a credit or debit note has been created from an invoice you cannot add any other type of item to it. 

These items also do not pull through to documents that affect stock. 

Landed Cost

It is used when there are costs that are in addition to the actual price of the item but are necessary costs to get the item to your warehouse. The landed costs will form part of the overall cost and weighted average cost of the product. 

Indirect Cost 

These are costs not associated with a specific product but are overall costs such as rental, utilities and administrative costs that are necessary for the running of the business.

Direct Cost

These are costs that are directly linked to the goods or services that a business sells.

SKU Items

SKU is only allowed on product types - Product-Inventory and Product-Non Inventory. 

Parent and Child Items: 

SKU allows you to create Parent and Child Items. The Parent must exist before the child so the parent must be created first. Once you select a SKU flag when you create the item be it Parent, Child or None you will not be able to change this. A child item can be added in 2 ways, one being where the item is created as normal and you select the SKU flag "child". This will then require a parent and a suffix to be filled in. The prefix will always be that of the Parent. Once the child item is created it will appear in the Parent Item under the SKU flag. 

The other way to add a child is to directly add the child from the Parent under the SKU flag. Here you simply type in the name and suffix and click add. In the example below Apple Sauce is the Parent and Cinnamon is the Child. The child will then take on the item fields such as Product type, tax code etc from the parent.


The field added to product list with a filter. On child products most fields are disabled in edit. The Parent Item Edit will update all children fields (so children store same info as parent on almost all fields). All product lookups have been updated to support this new SKU flag so we can limit certain document lookups based on SKU as well. For the most part the lookups are limited to None or Child SKU. This is so you can't select a parent when you shouldn't be able to. eg. You can't Deliver a Parent product. Stocksetup Adjustments are not allowed on Parent. The parents values are a sum of the children's values.


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Default Warehouse - Item


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