QuickBooks Bug: Building Fractional Assemblies
We spent several days working with one customer who could not get multiple level assemblies to build correctly with CCRQBOM. A requirements report would say that you could build, but when the build was issued the program would say that it couldn’t complete the build and would back everything out. It ends up that there is a bug in QuickBooks itself that is causing the problem.
Let’s start with a simple assembly. SampleMidAssy is an assembly item that has one component, SampleComponent. We are only using one SampleComponent to build each SampleMidAssy. And, we have 547.284 on hand for the component item.
Using the Mult-Build function of CCRQBOM, I tell the system that I want to build 547.284 of this assembly, and generate a requirements report. Note that the program says that I have enough components to build these assemblies.
However, if I actually try to build this quantity, I get an error that says that their are insufficient parts to build this assembly?
We spent quite a bit of time working on this (the product structure had many levels an a LOT of parts, so it was hard to pick out the exact issue). Finally, we can to the realization that it wasn’t a bug in CCRQBOM, it actually was a bug in QuickBooks itself.
If we go to the build assemblies function of QuickBooks, you can see that the program is telling us that we need 547.284 of the component to build 547.284 of the assembly, and that we have that quantity on hand. We should be able to build this! Looking at the maximum number you can build information at the bottom, you see that it says that the maximum we can build is 547.28399. That is 0.0001 less than what we have on hand of the component.
We’ve worked with this quite a bit – it is not an issue of having a funny value for the quantity on hand due to various transactions. The problem is in QuickBooks itself. They calculate the can build value incorrectly, and this prevents the build from happening.
Workarounds
Note that this only happens if you are building fractional quantities. In this customer’s case, they were creating a subassembly that was a tube and cloth construction, and they needed 45 1/16 inches of this assembly. They cut the item very precisely. It created problems because this was a low level assembly, so the mult build function would work its way through several subassemblies and would build just enough of this subassembly to fit the needs, but that wouldn’t be enough to address this error when you built the higher level assembly.
There aren’t a lot of good workarounds, since this is a bug in QuickBooks itself and is not something that we can control. Some ideas:
- Don’t use fractional quantities, use whole items. Instead of 45 1/6 use 46. This might work for some people, but it isn’t always feasible (this is what the customer is doing to get around the problem, and then they are doing adjustments to the physical inventory periodically).
- Build the subassembly in a separate step, and build whole quantities, so that you have more than enough on hand, slightly more than what is needed. Then do your build with the use subassembly balances feature turned on in CCRQBOM.
Versions Affected
All versions of CCRQBOM will run into this problem. We’ve tried coming up with ways to get around it, but none of them work. We could try checking the “can build” value for each assembly before a build, but that is a slow calculation in QuickBooks and slows the program down too much. In addition, we would have to try issuing inventory adjustments for the assemblies in values like 0.0001, and that introduces errors into the inventory count. There isn’t a good way that we can program around this bug in QuickBooks.
We have determined that this exists in QuickBooks Premier 2009 and 2010 and QuickBooks Enterprise V9 and V10. We didn’t test any further back than 2009.
We’ve reported this bug to Intuit, it is hard to say if they will address it or not.
Category: CCRQBOM
About the Author (Author Profile)
Charlie Russell is the founder of CCRSoftware. He’s been involved with the small business software industry since the mid 70′s, focusing on inventory and accounting software for small businesses. He is a Certified Advanced QuickBooks ProAdvisor and participate extensively in the QuickBooks Community user forums under the ID of CCRussell.
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Charlie, as you know my client builds polyuethane parts and uses fractional amounts of various chemicals in the multilevel build. We ran into problems with too many places after the decimal point, which you were able to fix by rounding the quantities. I don’t think we will run into this one because we always have excess on hand. However, we also cut tubing, but are not that precise. I will leave notes with them that they need a little extra in inventory for these build. I think another work around would be to add “one unit” to inventory on these builds and then reverse it after the build….
Mary, we tried a couple of things but I don’t like the results. And it most likely won’t work.
If we have a multiple level BOM situation, and I do an inventory adjustment of the lower level component to avoid that rounding issue, the build worked. But when I reversed that inventory adjustment afterwards, QB would detect that and would redo the “can build” calculation. The same error would occur, and the program would turn the builds I issued back into “pending” builds. Which had cascading problems.
Also, you have an audit trail that is really messy with all these fractional adds and deletes, which is a problem for some people.
I’ve sent this on to Intuit so maybe it will get fixed, but I’m not holding my breath…