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Quickbooks Enterprise questions - BOMs and assemblies

The Dude

Hot Rolled
Joined
Oct 19, 2010
Location
Portland, OR
Working with a company using Quickbooks Enterprise. They are an OEM and the level of documentation in QB is way behind how they build this in the shop (i.e. lots of tribal knowledge used to get the job done). A few questions:

1. For something like wire, angle, etc. (i.e. stuff with an unit of measure = "foot"), can you set up a part number (that you give it) for the material (e.g. "16ga-stran-cw-red" = 16 ga stranded copper wire, red), give it a UOM = ft, and then have multiple different vendors and their part numbers that all relate back to the one number? For instance, you might by it in a 250 ft or a 1000 ft roll, and might have McMaster Carr and Platt as different suppliers (so you could have two vendors each with two items, 4 items total, that are all ties to "16ga-stran-cw-red". You should be able to mark a preference/default (say to Platt, for a 250' roll) and then lookup other varieties if they are out of stock.

2. You should be able to then put your part number in the BOM or assembly, correct? This would be 16ga-stran-cw-red, 50'.

3. Can you have parts and assemblies tie into BOMs? Right now, I think they could get by with model number = one giant BOM = mostly a list of parts but maybe a few assemblies.

I might want to take this deeper but wanted to start out "shallow". If you've run into some limitations with Enterprise that go further, feel free to chime in. I don't know QB that well but don't want to take these guys down a bunny trail that will dead-end in a fox hole. These guys are advanced enough that they really could use a full-fledged ERP system but it would be nice if they could get another couple years out of QB while all the data is being created (i.e. not bring on two major changes at once).

Thanks,
The Dude
 
If you want to do this the right way get AllOrders which integrate tightly with QuickBooks and does a far better job of what you are asking. It looks like QuickBooks so learning it is quick. However it understands use by inches in our shop, sold to a customer by the foot and purchased as a 500 ft roll. Unlimited vendors for the same part. Multi-User with a license scheme that allows say 2 seats with 4 users but only two at a time. Currently we have 4 seats with about 8 users and haven't had a need for more yet. We had 12 seats at my last job with AllOrders. I've been using it for about 10 years now and it gets better continuously.

We have our parts in SolidWorks linked to AllOrders by our part number and a custom Excel macro that massages the BOM from SolidWorks for direct import to AllOrders. That generate work orders for parts, and work orders for assemblies at every level, a pick list for pulling materials before ordering the ones we don't have.

The real icing on the cake is that McMaster order with 300 items that go in 30 different subassemblies. The customized reciever generated by AllOrder shows how many of each part goes in each subassembly bin. The bins are labeled by AllOrders by Customer and subassembly so parts get handled just once being placed in the correct bin right from the McMaster box!
 








 
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