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Tech Tips-MLI for the Reporting to the MAX The new Multi-Location Inventory add-on for Accounting for Windows is a welcome addition to the Reporting to the MAX including Point of Sale and Non-profit Versions product line. Its powerful features are invaluable to inventory managers who need to account for more than one location. It eliminates all the manual work done when your inventory system doesn’t account for multiple locations. But before you can put these time and effort-saving features to work for your customers, you must set up the stock items for each location. You can easily enter the stock items for multiple locations through the Inventory Stock screen. Once you have added and saved a stock item for one location, you can quickly add the same item for other locations. When you save the first item, all of the information about that item, except for location and quantity on hand, carries over to the next blank record. Enter or lookup the next location, enter the quantity on hand, and save the record. Once you have added records for one stock item for all locations, move on to the next stock item and add records for each location. The MLI add-on also includes a feature that enables you to copy your stock items from one location to another. This is useful if your stock item master records already exist for one location and you simply need to make copies for the other locations. You can make copies for one item, a range of items, or all items. You will still need to add on-hand quantities for the copied records, but this is a fraction of the work of adding the entire records. The above methods are feasible for inventories with no more than a few thousand stock items, but for businesses with tens or hundreds of thousands of stock items per location, the keyboard work is overwhelming. In these cases, you need to make use of Data Exchange as much as possible. When Data Exchange is used in conjunction with a spreadsheet, such as Microsoft Excel, data can be manipulated and imported much more efficiently. If you have a list by location of your inventory items in a text file, spreadsheet, or other Data Exchange compatible format, you can import them directly into the Inventory Master or Cost/Quantity files. Once the records are imported, you can run a utility found in Inventory Options to build the Master from the Cost/Quantity file or vice-versa. After doing so, you can run a utility called INUPDT that builds the INMAT.DBF file from the INMAS.DBF file. If you don’t run this utility, you will be unable to look up your stock items with the lookup feature. After running the utilities, rebuild the indexes on all inventory files. If you don’t have a list of your inventory items to import, but your stock item master records already exist for one location, you can still use Data Exchange to save data entry. Export the records to a spreadsheet using Data Exchange. Use the spreadsheet COPY feature to make copies of the records and the FILL feature to fill in the location code for the copies. You can also enter your on-hand quantities in the spreadsheet. In most cases this is faster than entering quantities in the accounting software. When finished, import the records back into the master file, the utilities to build the associated INCQD.DBF and INMAT.DBF files, and re-index the inventory files. Larry SweatInformation Systems and Design Manager |
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