When you keep parts in your inventory that belong to your customers, you may need to keep a record of the customers' acquisition values for the parts. Despite the fact that the customer-owned stock is not part of your inventory value, there may for instance be legal, auditing, insurance, and reporting reasons for keeping track of the acquisition value of the parts, i.e., the value that the parts have to the customer. The part acquisition values are maintained in the customers' currencies.
The need for tracking part acquisition values may be customer-dependent, i.e., some of your customers could require that you record values while you may not need to do so for other customers. In addition, the level of tracking wanted may differ. When maintained, the acquisition values can be by part, lot, or serial. Therefore, you can choose between the following four levels of acquisition value handling for each of your customers:
When customer-owned stock arrives or is received into inventory, an estimated acquisition value is automatically stored for the part if one does not already exist on the level specified for the customer. If the acquisition values are to be tracked by lot or serial, and the lot or serial values are not entered on arrival, then an acquisition value record is created on part level if it does not already exist. When the lot or serial values are indicated as part of the receipt handling, new acquisition value records are created on the level specified for the customer, if they do not already exist. If a record already exists for the appropriate combination of part, lot, serial, and customer, the value is not automatically updated. Depending on how a customer-owned part is received, the following estimated acquisition values are used:
On an automatically created customer part acquisition value record, the Source field is always set to Estimate.
Existing customer part acquisition value records can be updated manually. Typically, this is done when you receive new or updated acquisition value information from a customer. When updating a value, it is possible to modify its source and register additional information. You can view a history of the updates that have been made for a specific acquisition value record.
The customer part acquisition values are also displayed in Inventory Part In Stock so that you easily can query and summarize the acquisition values of the customer-owned parts that are currently in your inventory.