GL determination by item group

Note: GL determination by item group is not a configuration that is recommended or supported by Eralis Job unless you have configured your system in a specific manner.

The background to the issue is the way in which SAP Business One determines the inventory control account that should be used when doing inventory transactions.

The traditional configuration for Eralis Job is to have a General Ledger account for work in progress associated to Eralis Job, and then Inventory Control accounts to manage the inventory held by the company.

This provides the benefit of being able to see the value of work in progress within the balance sheet separate from the inventory balances.

With GL determination by item group, these multiple control accounts cannot be used and any stock transfers between warehouses use the same inventory control account based on the group assigned to the item. In an Eralis Job environment, this will lead to WIP imbalances unless you only have a single account for your WIP balance and for your inventory control accounts.

However, in many situations GL determination by item group is required to allow posting of sales and cost of sales through to the income statement based on the item group. If this is what the company wants to achieve, there are other ways to do this, assuming the invoicing will be coming from Eralis Job.

On each job line within Eralis Job, a sales and cost of sales GL account can be applied. When an A/R invoice is raised, Eralis Job will look at the line involved in the invoice to see if a value has been set in the fields on the line for sales and COGS, and if so, the system will post the value and cost associated to that line to the accounts specified on the line.

If no accounts have been specified on the line, then the system will use the default sales and COGS account that is defined on the Accounting tab of the master job.

By using a trigger, the sales and cost of sales GL accounts on the job line can be set to the values from the item group assigned to the item code on the line.

This will then result in the sales and cost of sales posting being posted to the income statement based on the item group. The item code (and SAP Business One) must still be configured to GL determination by warehouse or by item code which are the recommended and supported GL determination methods.

In order to use this facility, it does mean that the company must configure the sales and COGS accounts on the item groups setup, even though the values will not be used by standard SAP Business One.

Attached to this thread is the SQL script for the trigger to achieve this posting.

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