Re: JBA ML - Landed Costs

Greetings, Stuart.   Been a while since we spoke.

As regards your question of how to reconcile inbound landed costs to actual
freight billed, am afraid JBA does not provide a canned solution, nor are
there any easy answers.

One possibility is to ask your suppliers to sell their goods to you FOB;
that way, there's nothing to reconcile (unless you have a fanatical CFO who
wants to break out freight costs from COG in the absence of supporting
data).

Another possibility is to use service POs to capture freight billed, then
3-way match those POs (so they can be paid by A/P).    You'll want to
record the GRN of the physical goods receipt in the "Supplier item ref"
display field in program PM082 of option 41/PMP (said data goes into field
VCAT03 of PMP03).   You could then use develop a reconciliation report (I'd
use query) to match freight landed cost data from PMP07 with the PMP03
records associated with the aforementioned service POs.

Obviously, the second approach may be more work than it's worth.   There'd
be additional data entry (although freight invoices still need to be keyed,
somehow).   There's also the apportionment problem: if I get a $100 freight
invoice for a receipt involving 1 ton of scrap metal worth $100 and 100
machined parts   worth $1,000, how do I apportion the freight?   If you
discover big discrepancies between actual and estimated landed costs, you'd
have to maintain your item supplier profiles (probably a good thing, unless
you have to do it often and for lots of ISPs).

Incidentally, many companies with large truck fleets are trending towards a
deeper analysis of inbound freight (usually part of a 3rd party logistics
initiative sponsored by senior management), since, with proper routing,
such companies may be able to bring in their raw materials less expensively
than suppliers can ship them.

So, now you have my 2 centavos.   Call me if you want to chat about it in
greater detail.