Recovering WIP Costs for a Job Closed Accidentally

If you accidentally close an in-process job, all costs that were in WIP will be written off to the item's inventory adjustment account (if the item is Actual-costed) or to variance accounts (if Standard-costed). Also, the WIP buckets on the job will be cleared.

The system writes these WIP-clearing entries to the SF Dist journal. You can change the job's status back to Released to continue processing, but doing so does not move the written-off cost back into WIP.

Therefore, the only way to recover the WIP costs is to issue a non-item master material to the job for the total cost that had been written off. When you do this, you can enter the cost at which to issue the item and the offsetting account to WIP. The detailed steps are as follows (read all the steps before attempting this process):

1. To find the amounts that were written off, locate the journal transactions in the SF Dist journal that were created when you closed the job. The transactions have a different reference depending on how the job was closed:
   • If the job was closed on the Job Orders form, look for INV JCLS + job number.
   • If the job was closed via a job transaction, look for INV JFIN + job number.

     There may be up to five entries to the job's WIP accounts (material, labor, fixed ovhd, variable ovhd and outside). If the parent item on the job has a cost type of Actual, the offsetting account is Inventory Adjustment. If the cost type is Standard, the offsetting accounts are Material Usage Variance and/or Routing Variance.

2. Issue a non-item master item to the job. Follow these steps:
   1. Open the Job Material Transactions form and add a new transaction for the job (click in an empty row in the grid to add a new transaction).
   2. Select the check box in the Select field for your new transaction.
   3. In the Item field, enter an item ID that represents the process, such as "RECVRD_WIP_COST."
   4. In the Quantity field, enter 1.
   5. In the five cost buckets, enter the amount that had been written off to each WIP account into the appropriate bucket.
   6. In the Other Account field, enter the account to which the amounts had been written off. If the item is Actual costed, enter the inventory adjustment account that was hit when the job was closed. That will then reverse the entry that was made to Inventory Adjustment when the job was closed.

      If the item is Standard costed, both Material Usage and Routing Variance may have been hit. If only one of the two were hit, enter that account into the Other Account field. If both were hit, enter one of the two accounts and then enter a general journal transaction, which reverses the appropriate amount into the other account.

3. Click the Process button to post the transaction. The following message displays:

   "Not one job material where item is RECVRD_WIP_COST exists for job operation that has [job number] and [operation number]. Add will be performed for job material."

4. Click OK.

At this point, all of the costs will be back in the WIP accounts in the general ledger and the job's WIP buckets. Also, the amounts will have been reversed from the accounts into which they had originally been cleared.

Related Topics

About Job WIP Costs

About Planned Costs on a Job

How Scrap Affects Job Cost