manufacturing ERP and accounting

Bitaboh

Run the whole manufacturing business from one connected system.

Manufacturing, inventory, purchasing, sales, labour and accounting, working from one set of records rather than six.

An illustration of the interface. Every figure in it is a placeholder.

What is in it

Eight areas, each one a part of the menu a signed in person actually has.

Accounting

Double entry ledger with journals that are never edited, only reversed, and VAT treatments that carry through to filings. Trial balance, balance sheet, profit and loss and cash flow, over periods that open, close and lock.

Ledger
Statements
Periods

Manufacturing

Versioned bills of material and routings behind work orders that hold standard cost against actual and account for the variance. Work in progress is tracked by stage, with ageing.

Bills of material
Work orders
Variances

Inventory

Stock movements in eighteen types, valued by the method the business has chosen. Batch and serial traceability runs through the same movements.

Movements
Valuation
Traceability

Sales

The whole sales cycle in one place: quotation, order, dispatch, invoice, receipt and credit note.

Quotations
Dispatch
Invoicing

Purchasing

The purchase cycle from requisition through order, receipt, bill and payment, with matching between what was ordered, what arrived and what was billed.

Requisitions
Receipts
Matching

Labour and Payroll

Piece rate, daily and salaried labour on one payroll, with overtime and deductions.

Piece rate
Overtime
Deductions

Reporting

30 reports across the accounts, stock, production and labour. Every one of them exports as CSV, spreadsheet or PDF.

CSV
Spreadsheet
PDF

Security and Audit

Nine roles built from 42 named capabilities, so a person sees the part of the system their job needs. The audit log keeps the value before, the value after and the reason given.

Roles
Capabilities
Audit log

Not every business runs every module. Several are optional and are switched on per company.

Operations and accounting stay connected

A business event is recorded once, where it happens. What follows it is the same chain seen from a different desk, so the transactions behind a figure can be followed back to the event that caused them.

PurchasingRequisitions, orders, goods received and supplier bills.
InventoryOne ledger of movements behind every item and store.
ManufacturingWork orders, operations and work in progress.
Finished goodsOutput received into stock with its batch or serial.
SalesDispatch, invoices, receipts and credit notes.
AccountingJournals, the trial balance and the statements on top of them.

What this does not say. Not every workflow raises an accounting entry of its own, and nothing here claims that it does. Some are made in the same step that saves the document. Others wait for a deliberate one: posting a draft, approving payroll, closing a work order, running depreciation. And an order is a commitment rather than a transaction, so it posts nothing at all. What holds in every case is that an entry names the document behind it, so the two records can be read against each other rather than taken on trust.

Manufacturing and costing

What a run was supposed to cost, what it did cost, and where the difference went.

A work order is planned from what a thing is made of and how it is made, and what it cost is worked out from what the order actually consumed. Every stage leaves a record the next one is built on.

Bill of materialsWhat one unit is made of, held by version, so an order made last year still reads against the bill it was made under.
RoutingThe operations the work passes through and the work centre each one runs at, versioned in the same way.
Work orderA quantity to make, planned from the bill and the routing above it.
ProductionMaterial issued, operations booked and output declared as the work actually happens rather than afterwards.
Work in progressWhat has gone in and not yet come out, carried as a balance that can be opened and read rather than estimated.
Finished goodsOutput received into stock, carrying the batch or the serial it was made as.
CostingWhat the order cost set against what it was expected to cost, cleared out of work in progress when the order is closed.

What the journey computes

Standard cost: What a unit is expected to cost, built up from the bill of materials and the routing.
Actual cost: What the order really took in material, labour and overhead, per unit of good output.
Material variance: The gap between the material the output should have taken and the material it took.
Labour variance: What the labour on the order cost, against the standard labour cost of what came out good. A comparison of cost, not of hours booked against routed time.
Overhead: Absorbed onto production at a rate rather than left sitting in a period total, with what was absorbed set against what was incurred.
Work in progress ageing: How long value has been sitting in production, so an order that has stopped moving shows.
Batch and serial traceability: Forward from a batch to everywhere it went, and back from a unit to everything that went into it, with any link that cannot be proved reported as a break.

Bills of material and routings are versioned. A run made last season is read against the recipe and the route that were in force then, rather than against whatever the master file says today.
Standard cost against actual cost, per run. Each production run carries what it was expected to cost beside what it really cost, so the gap belongs to a batch rather than to a month.
Material, labour and overhead variances. The gap is split three ways, which is the difference between knowing production cost more than planned and knowing which of the three did it.
Work in progress by stage, with ageing. What is sitting at each stage and how long it has been sitting there, so a batch that has stopped moving is visible before it is written off.
Batch and serial traceability, both directions. Forward from a delivery of raw material to everything it went into, and back from a customer delivery to the batches and the suppliers behind it.

Traceable transactions

The part of an accounting system worth checking before the feature list.

The record is built so that any number on a screen can be opened up and accounted for, and so that nothing already written down has to be altered to put a mistake right.

01Figures are computed, not storedAn account balance is the sum of its journal lines, worked out at the moment somebody asks for it. Stock is the same: it comes from the movements behind it, so there is no kept total that can quietly drift away from the entries.
02A correction is a reversalA posted journal is never edited and never deleted. The correction is a second entry that reverses the first and names it, so the mistake and the fix both stay on the record. Correcting a document takes the same route underneath.
03A deleted document stays explainableRemoving something asks for a reason and keeps it, along with who removed it, when, and what it held at the time. The document stays, marked as void. It can be restored, and the entries it made are put back with it.
04A statement proves its own arithmeticThe closing balance is reached twice, once by carrying the opening balance through the movement and once from the open items behind it. Any difference is reported on the statement, and one that does not reconcile says so rather than being sent.

Nothing is stored as a balance. Every figure on every screen is computed from the transactions underneath it, so a total can always be opened and read back to the entries that made it.
A journal is never edited and never deleted. A correction is posted as a reversal, so the original entry and the correction both stay in the record and the history cannot be rewritten.
A deleted document is recoverable for thirty days. A full copy is kept for that period, and a permanent record explains why the numbering has a gap, so a missing number is answered rather than argued about.
A statement of account proves its own arithmetic. It computes the closing balance two ways and reports the difference between them, so a statement that does not add up says so instead of being sent.

Access and audit

Who may do what, who did it, and what it looked like before they did.

Somebody will ask who changed this, and when, and what it said before. The record is kept so that the answer is a row rather than a recollection.

A person makes a changeSomebody holding the capability for it edits, posts or removes something.
The value beforeWhat the field held is taken down before the new value replaces it.
The changeThe value it becomes, and which record and which field it belongs to.
The reasonWhere the action has to be explained, removal above all, it does not proceed without one.
The audit recordOne row holding the person, the time, the action and both values.

What the record holds

Capabilities, not job titles: A role holds capabilities and every check is made against the capability rather than the name of the role. Recording a sale and recording the money against it are separate ones, and where a second person is required, the person who raised the thing cannot be the one who approves it.
Every journal names its author: A posting carries the person who made it, and the register shows that name against it.
System and manual postings are told apart: An entry the software raised as a document was saved is marked apart from one somebody typed, and the register can be narrowed to either.
A void keeps its history: Voiding removes nothing. The document stays, the reason stays with it, and the balances simply stop counting it.

Those four are what the record holds, and this page claims nothing else about it.

Roles are built from capabilities, not from a single switch. Nine roles are assembled from more than forty named capabilities, so a storekeeper, a bookkeeper and an auditor each see the work that is theirs.
Every correction keeps the before, the after and the reason. A changed figure is stored with the value it replaced and the explanation the person gave, so a question a year later has an answer rather than a guess.
Every journal names its author. And says whether a person posted it or the system did, which is the first question anybody asks of an entry they were not expecting to find.