Maintaining accurate inventory balances and costs seems to cause a lot of headaches for users. I have been working with customers who were not watching the costs they were entering inventory adjustments, thus making their valuation grossly overstated.
To resolve we decided to run the Historical Inventory reset tool. This was a customer that went live on Dynamics GP 2010. While this seemed, at the time, to be a good way to get the GL in balance with their subledger, it actually caused the numbers to continue to be off. Since there was already data in the SEE30303 table (the table that the Historical Inventory Trial Balance HITB Report uses) the numbers still didn’t balance. Upon further research and evaluation, we discovered that it was actually doubling the amounts. Since we knew that this table wasn’t used elsewhere, we decided to delete everything in this table and run the tool again. This brought our subledger and GL to tie to the penny.
Now, don’t take this as it being ok to simply delete the contents of this table. Be sure that you are not using this data for any other analysis or reporting, as it will definitely break your other reporting.
The Reset tool is designed for those on versions prior to Dynamics GP. Its purpose is to get your data in the subledger to balance to GL as of the date the tool is run. This will then give you the ability to run the Historical IV Trial Balance report on a monthly basis as you would the Historical AP Trial Balance. Essentially giving you the ability to go back in time and get a true valuation of what your inventory looked like.
The Historical Inventory Reset tool can be downloaded via CustomerSource or PartnerSource.
What did we learn from all this. First, the costs that your inventory items are brought in to the system are vitally important. Mistakes can snowball, especially when you use Bill of Materials or other advanced distribution functions. Once a cost is overstated, the cost of those finished good will be grossly overstated. Second, running the Inventory Reset Tool will not work if there are already transactions in the SEE30303 table.
For customers using Dynamics GP inventory – make sure anyone that has access to adjust inventory is aware of importance of cost. Many times these users have come from a system where inventory wasn’t even tracked – so who cares what the actual cost is? Dynamics GP inventory does care, and so should the users.