If you use JobTracker Inventory, then you know it can help you keep track of remnants. However, there are a couple of different ways to create remnants, and it’s important to use the appropriate approach for each circumstance.
If a serial number is added to a job activity, then you should create a remnant directly from the serial number on that job activity (NOT from the serial number details view).
If you need to create a remnant from a serial number that has NOT been assigned to a job activity – most likely because a slab broke – then you should create the remnant directly from the serial number details view.
This isn’t completely obvious – and the result is that sometimes customers get in the habit of creating remnants the “wrong way” and discover later they need to clean things up. To help with that cleanup – and perhaps help you avoid the need for it in the first place – I wrote a detailed help page on this subject, including a whopping 11-minute video explaining the problem and how to clean it up.
One little detail that I didn’t go into in the video … let’s say you have a 60 x 120 slab that was dropped and now you have two smaller pieces that you’d like to treat as remnants. Create TWO new remnants of the appropriate size from that serial number and then do an adjustment to bring the original serial number’s on-hand balance to zero. That way the original serial number won’t show up in inventory anymore.
It’s also worth noting that some customers don’t bother tracking remnants in inventory at all. If you have enough space to let customers browse remnants themselves, then you could reasonably treat it as “bargain material” and add it as a new serial number directly on a material detail page only when a customer decides to purchase it (with zero cost or an averaged cost of storage). That approach doesn’t give you a history of material, but it’s simpler to manage in some cases.
I hope this discussion is useful for someone … our inventory software is very powerful, but it can cause headaches if you get out of sync with it. If your inventory isn’t working quite right for you, be sure to reach out to us so that we can help you make it right.
