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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Small and medium business | Business Central, N... / A PO for items that ar...
Small and medium business | Business Central, N...
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A PO for items that are normally inventory items but can also be for other purpose than COGS?

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Posted on by HLeer 6
Hello BC community,
 
as an R&D organization that has its own manufacturing entity, we have situations where PO items are normally used for manufacturing, but also cases where the same items can be used for R&D projects. Is there a way for us to create POs so that the item would be posted directly to the R&D cost account and not the usual material purchase accounts?
 
Currently the only way I can think of is unfortunately having to manually repost the entries at month-end for example, or having to create two separate items in BC for the same /hammer/, depending on its use in manufacturing or in R&D?
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    Jun Wang Profile Picture
    Jun Wang 7,645 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at
    A PO for items that are normally inventory items but can also be for other purpose than COGS?
    though it is cumbersome I see the recommended way is to keep those as separate items, and set up different posting groups. BC doesn't track non inventory items so you will keep accurate inventory numbers. Unless you want to track those inventory as well, then you could use previous suggestion to manually change the posting groups at transaction time. 
     
    Jun Wang 
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    Valentin Castravet Profile Picture
    Valentin Castravet 26,904 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at
    A PO for items that are normally inventory items but can also be for other purpose than COGS?
    Kaspars suggestion to create a 2nd non-inventory item and purchase that item instead can work.
     
    Another common approach in these scenarios is buy the item as you regularly do. When its used by the R&D team, use an item journal to do a negative adjustment to remove the item from inventory. In the item journal, change the Gen. Prod. Posting Group so the item's negative adjustment hits the correct GL cost account.
      
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    KasparsSemjonovs Profile Picture
    KasparsSemjonovs 4,127 Super User 2025 Season 1 on at
    A PO for items that are normally inventory items but can also be for other purpose than COGS?
    Hi,
    Purchase account is taken from the Gen. Prod. Posting group - from Item card. It means, that if You would like to have one item to be posted differently from the same PO - in the lines Item quantities would need to be split - for the manufacturing in one line, and for R&D in separate line. In the R&D line, the Gen. Prod. Posting group should be different. 
    To achieve this there are 2 options;
    1) keep duplicate items for R&D purposes with different Gen. Prod. Posting group on the item card. If You don't want the stock to pile up for items here, You can provide them to be Type = Non-inventory or Service.
    2) Add the column Gen. Prod. Posting  in the PO lines. And for those items/quantities that will go to R&D, indicate different Gen Prod. Posting group. This has to be changed manually - as when Item is selected, it will fill up with the value from Item card.

    For both option You would need to add General Posting Setup lines for the Gen. Bus. Posting group and the new Gen. Prod. Posting group combination, and indicate the Purchase account the R&D GL account.

    One other option (but not sure if it works well), would be to use different locations. For manufacturing use FACTORY, and for research use RD location. This way when purchased, the value of goods will be accumulated in different G/L accounts (form the Inventory Posting Setup). But this way inventory would pile up, and You would need to perform monthly actions - to transfer value from RD Inventory GL to R&D account, and then re-value items in R&D location to be of 0 value, and then to a phys. inventory for this location indicating that there are no more items here - so that Inventory levels for these items don't mess up the Procurement process, and they can see that these items are out of stock when planning new purchases for Manufacturing.

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