March 2008

Cut the (s)crap

by Vjekoslav Babic on March 30, 2008

[I had to edit this post on April 01, 2008. And no, it's not April Fool's Prank] 

Have you ever wondered how manufacturing scrap works? Or what it really is? It’s an interesting topic, and yet a very confusing one. It has caused so many headaches to the project team I worked on recently, because nobody really understood it. So, what is manufacturing scrap?

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Elementary costing 3: FIFO, LIFO, UFO…

by Vjekoslav Babic on March 27, 2008

Due to fluctuations in market prices, purchase cost of goods may vary from one purchase to another. Also, you rarely just purchase goods and immediately sell them in the same quantity. What you usually do is that you purchase the goods, then let them sit in the inventory for a while, then you may sell five different purchases all at once, or you may sell goods from one purchase to five different customers.

All of these situations have different effects on your inventory value, because something else must be taken into account: cost flow. Regardless of the inventory valuation method you chose, whenever you take an item from the inventory, how do you know its cost? Without knowing its cost, you can’t know the cost of goods sold, so you better know your cost. Don’t tell me you stick the purchase price to each item, so that you can know exactly how much it cost whenever you are about to sell it, because accountants won’t subscribe to the idea.

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Elementary costing 2: Know your costs

by Vjekoslav Babic on March 26, 2008

When you buy a sheep, how much is it worth to you, what is its value? For starters, its value is at least what you paid for it, but that’s not quite it. Say you paid a hundred dollars for it. If you want to sell it now, how do you determine your selling price? A hundred-twenty? A hundred-fifty? Obviously, you need to increase the price by some percentage over whatever you paid initially, but regardless of what you increase your price, if you don’t know your true costs, you might be at loss.

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Elementary costing 1: Sheep and bricks

by Vjekoslav Babic on March 26, 2008

Unless you are a non-profit, the point of the business is making money. It is surprising how many different ways of making money there are out there, but if you are in business, it is extremely likely that you make the money the easiest and the most common way around: by selling goods.

There are many ways goods come to be, but from perspective of a single business goods can be either purchased, or manufactured. But even companies manufacturing the goods they sell have to somehow get hold of the raw materials used to produce their goods. The most common way to get the raw materials for your manufactured goods is to purchase them. So in the end of the day it comes down to the simple fact that the most common way of making money is by purchasing and selling goods.

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Much ado about nothing

by Vjekoslav Babic on March 25, 2008

There is really nothing special with this post. I just wanted to let you know that I updated my About page, and I added some more information to the sidebar to the right. Nothing spectacular, but I hope all of this would both help you know me better, and also help you get in touch with me otherwise than posting comments here.

While I must admit I seem somewhat lazy lately, with no relevant posts whatsoever, there is some real stuff coming soon. For now, I’m finished with face-lifting, and nothing serious is going to happen to this blog from presentation perspective, at least not until I move it to its own domain, which is something I plan to do soon. See you later!

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Look and feel update

March 18, 2008

I decided to upgrade the look and feel of this blog, so I start with the new header picture. I am not a designer, and I don’t have a clue about why graphics are good or bad, I just have a gut feeling which tells me what is nice, and what is not. This one [...]

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Why are "mandatory" fields baaad?

March 17, 2008

Last time, I gave you a recipe on how to do a bad thing. If you really need to do something bad, I figure it’s better to do it the way that would hurt the least, or the way that isn’t so bad after all. I wouldn’t have dreamt of a comment on that blog post, [...]

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Master data completeness validation

March 15, 2008

Microsoft Dynamics NAV has a very consistent user interface, that helps user get used to it pretty fast. Yet it has its own ways, that aren’t so intuitive to most of typical business application users. There is one specific feature which causes a lot of confusion, especially with those users only starting to use NAV. It’s the [...]

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Accounting vs. ERP: The saga continues

March 10, 2008

Running a business using only accounting data can be pretty much the same as driving a car using rear-view mirror only. The purpose of accounting is to provide accurate and reliable overview of financial situation to interested parties. What this financial overview consists of is the stuff that has happened in the past, in other [...]

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Accounting vs. ERP: Sticks and carrots

March 5, 2008

When referring to their ERP systems, it is pretty common that customers refer to it as accounting software. While it is true that every ERP system embeds some accounting functionality, there is a major difference between these two categories of software. It starts with two things: what computers are good at, and the goal of accounting as [...]

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Automated version management? Of course!

March 4, 2008

Imagine that whenever you edit an object in C/SIDE Object Designer, and save it, the system automatically saves it in the version history. Imagine that it never simply overwrites your previous version, but keeps all of them there for you. Imagine that you can see all of the modified versions of any object, then make any version the current version by doing as much [...]

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