Sage 100

Am I just totally missing something, or doesn't freezing inventory through Physical Count Worksheet prevent any transaction quantities from posting to the item tables until after the count is entered and updated??? I just froze everything in 5.10 XYZ, entered an inventory adjustment and saw it update the Stock Status and Valuation tables. I know the Physical Count table shows the QOH at time of freezing, but that doesn't help us when we're trying to analyze an in-progress count 5 days later. Maybe I've misunderstood what ""freezing"" really did this whole time?

Freezing just puts the records in the physical file with the current QOH. That's the freezing part. So when you finally run the register, you are comparing to the ""frozen"" QOH, not the current QOH.

Man, I was afraid somebody would say that. I can't believe I thought this was something else entirely for 10 years.

My understanding is the freezing just lock in the quantity that your counts will be compared to for calculation of the adjustment.

Freezing allows you to continue to post sales and receipts while performing the physical count. When the physical count is updated, the Variance is updated to the current quantity on hand.

Don't stress it too much. We all learn something new every day. I just learned that if you select to pay your AP checks by vendor name, the ACH remittance advices STILL print by vendor number. I haven't verified this but the user is quite knowledgeable about the process so I have no reason to think otherwise. Freezing the physical like this is a feature benefit so you can keep shipping immediately. I am old school so I don't know why anyone would not take a day or two break to get the count right. But then I have a couple clients that takes months to finish and then they wonder why they have such a big variance.....

When you have ongoing activity during your counting process you simply have to keep track of that activity so you can analyze variances. The transaction detail report can be useful. Another method I have had success with is freezing only what is going to be counted in a given day/hour to reduce the reconciliation process. The most important thing is to have a good plan and make sure everyone sticks to it. But I agree with Jeff regarding just taking a break and getting the count right, IF the business can operate that way.

Thanks everyone. I've been training the wrong way this whole time :|

With clients that spend a lot of time counting/recounting and such I advise that they make a backup company right after they do the freeze; that gives them a better snapshot of the inventory at the time of the freeze.

In my mind, it is freeze, count, THEN continue shipping/receiving if you must before you get the count entered and reconciled. It does make it difficult if you have a variance and you have already entered more transactions - unless you keep accurate track of them.

The whole point of freezing is to know what counts and valuations were in Sage before the count. The whole point of the count is to get the real world to match the computer world. But it still requires that you know what is to be counted. That's a task in and of itself. When things physically come in and go out after the freeze, those items have to be excluded or included during the count itself or you still lose track of what that count should be. Usually, it's this part that messes up the variance report. It's one of the reasons you'll see the variance register adjust an item up in one month and then down again the following month for the same quantity. I've seen this messed up so many times over the years it's just a matter of course that I tell people, shut your company down, throw everyone in the company at the count process and get it done so you can switch everything back on and go back to business. The ones who follow that advice actually get very good counts with few adjustments. Fortunately, these have always been small companies who can do their count in a day or two if they retask every employee to the count process. One large company I worked for took that advice, shut down from a Friday to a Monday night, paid everyone a lot of overtime, pizza and beer in order to count for four days straight to accomplish a 60 million dollar audited physical inventory over 9 warehouses full of tens of thousands of SKU's, etc. The heady days of accounting, eh?

Physical inventory tracking is 365/year process. If you only implement housekeeping, paperwork tracking, timely receiving & invoicing once a year, it is a disaster in the making. Good luck explaining why you had that 100K shrink. It is an exercise in futility. Companies that fail in this usually fail because it is ""too hard"" to do it the right way. I am dealing with a client now that typically takes 10 - 12 weeks to complete the cycle. They could do it in less than a week if they wanted.

Macola had a different approach. You could freeze the inventory as a specific date and then any newly posted transactions would compare the transaction date to the freeze date. If the transaction date was before the freeze, it would update your freeze counts. This way you could freeze your quantities and if you happened to find a receipt or shipment that was unposted, you could record it and not have to worry about keeping track of them as a variance.