Introduction
Consignments represent a group or collection of incoming produce or goods that arrive by freight (boat, lorry, and so on) or as a result of a harvest.
You can record the costs of consignments including haulage, storage, handling, production, labor, rebates and other costs incurred between the points of procurement and sale.
By recording income and revenue transactions against consignments, it’s possible to calculate a consignment’s profitability. This is calculated from a number of sources, such as sales, returns, credit memos, price changes, and so on. In effect, it’s the difference between consignment income and corresponding costs.
Profitability and income evaluation is not only important for internal business performance analysis but enables vendors to be paid based on commission of profit or sales on a consignment basis. Using profitability information, you can:
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identify which growers result in the most profit (taking into account quality as well as price);
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negotiate more favorable prices and or improve quality;
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pay growers based on the overall profitability.
A consignment is defined as any group of incoming items to be handled for which you want to measure profitability. A consignment can be a single lot on a single pallet, of a single item, or it can be a group of lots and pallets including multiple lots of different items. The consignment system can also work with items that are not configured to use pallet tracking, but for accurate reporting, lot tracking is recommended.
Aptean Food and Beverage ERP Enterprise Edition permits a high level of automation for consignment processing. Consignments can be generated automatically based on a purchase receipt and costs automatically budgeted. Subsequent costs can be captured throughout production, sales and customer returns, without any additional input from operational users.
Each type of cost that can be captured against a consignment is recorded in cost elements. These reflect a specific type of cost or charge. You can configure the system to use any number of cost charges for any given business.