Inventory Stock Status Report of a Certain Date
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Q - If I need an inventory report, do I need to run that at month end or can I run that at any point in the future for a date in the past?
A - An inventory status report for a date in the past is a very complicated animal. There are several ways to help your accounting department keep inventory stock status information.
- Use Defer Processing - Implement a Defer Processing task so you can schedule tasks to run at a given time, like running an inventory stock status report at the end of month, or on the first of every month. The Defer Processing reports are spooled to disk so you can later on go to the spooled reports manager to view your inventory stock status report at the end of a given month.
- Freeze Inventory at End of Month - You may use “Freeze Inventory” as a month-end procedure to take a snapshot of the inventory on a particular date and print to disk. There's a separate "Free Inventory" Report that you can run to retrieve that snapshot value.
- Print Inventory Stock Status Report with a Snapshot – A user may print a Stock Status Report any time and keep a snapshot report in the database for future reprinting. Because there's no limit for the number of snapshots, this method is more flexible than "Freeze Inventory."
- Inventory Aging Report by Specific Date - A user may run an Aging Report for a specific date in the past. While this report is very flexible and does not require the user to defer, freeze or do a snapshot as in the previous three methods, running an inventory aging report for a specific date tends to be slow. In addition, it uses a different database table - a transaction audit file for inference on the “Quantity and Unit Cost” of a specific date. The accuracy of this report sometimes can suffer if the quality of the transaction audit file is in question. For example, purging of this table can be problematic for the accuracy of this report. Transferring inventory between locations can affect the accuracy of this report when running it for a single location only.
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