We do not use standard cost or most recent cost in our items. We only use base price.
When the day end is run an entry for Inventory Control and Cost of Sales is generated. We are not sure where the amounts are coming from as there are no costs in the items.
We ran a Items Listing with the costs showing and some of the items that are causing the problem have 'previous' most recent costs and standard costs. On one invoice the old most recent cost was 2.18 and the amount generated on the journal entry for both sides was 8.72.
We tried to run an update via the update items using an adjustment for the standard cost of 99.00% and it doesn't update anything because the costs are 0.00.
How can I get rid of the 'previous' costs so we don't have to do a journal entry every month?
Thanks in advance for your assistance.

Hi LJA,

What version of OrderEntry are you running?

What is the Costing Method of your items? FIFO, LIFO, standard costing, etc? This will identify how costs are determined when you perform Day End in OE.

Also, do you allow negative inventory in your IC company profile? This is important if an item has negative qty, the usual rules are over-ridden. Also a 'residual cost' may have been applied if the quantity on hand became negative, meaning if there was a non-zero 'Total Cost' on the item at the point that quantity equals zero, that total cost gets applied to orders (or at least it did in older OE versions).

OE Day End does not update the costs such as Standard Cost or Most Recent Cost. These fields can only ever be edited manually (ie from Edit Items) or if you post a receipt for the item (either in Inventory or Purchase Orders). The 'change date' will indicate when the cost change was made, and perhaps you can identify this with a receipt?

The 'previous' cost is informational only and does not affect any processing. It only indicates that the cost changed from one value to another, and you can see what the previous value is.

We'll need some more information in order to be able to answer this question better.

Sorry, if you are not using IC, then you must be using a 'User specified' costing method - there is not other choice. The Most Recent Cost of the item will default when you add a new detail to an order.

If the MRC of an item was 2.18, this would be used as a default cost for your order. The scenario we need to determine is what function or process wrote 2.18 to the most recent cost field, if you were hoping it should be zero. OE would not do this.

Thanks for the reply on this. We run OE without IC. We do not use any cost in the items other than base price. We converted from ACCPAC Plus so maybe some of the costs have come over from there.
As I said before, if I run an update on the standard cost nothing updates so we know the current data all has 0.00 in it.
How would you suggest getting rid of the old numbers?
I could use the same inventory control and cost of goods sold codes in the company profile but the entries that come from OE will still show there. Kind of annoying.

If you want to set all items to have a Most Recent Cost of zero, the easiest way of doing this is to:

1a) Use Export Items to export all your item codes to an Excel spreadsheet. You only need to export the Item Number and Most Recent Cost fields and no others.
or
1b) Use the SmartFinder on the Item code to export all your item codes to Excel Spreadsheet. You only need to export the Item Number and Most Recent Cost fields and no others - use the Column Editor to define the columns. One advantage here is that you can list only the items that have a Most Recent Cost not equal to zero before exporting, so you know where the culprits are.

2) Edit the Excel spreadsheet and ensure the Most Recent Cost column only contains zero amounts.

3a) Use the Import Items function to import the item changes. In the import template, make sure that the Add Items checkbox is not selected (you are not adding new items) and also the Overwrite Items checkbox is selected (you want to make changes to your existing items). For the selected fields, you only need the Item Number and Most Recent Cost fields and no others.
or
3b) Use the same procedure as above but only select the Item number field to import, and a Filler for the second field - to skip the Most Recent Cost in the Excel file. Then set a Default Field on the third tab to set Most Recent Cost to 0.00. This will then import 0.00 for Most Recent Cost for all items.

Make a backup of your data before attempting this, or other processes that make significant changes to your data.