Best Practices
Consider the following best practices:
• Before closing, QAD recommends that you run Periodic Costing frequently.
Period closing must be a continuous process—you should not leave issues to period end. You should run Periodic Costing often, for example, every week, within a period as a method to check your purchase orders and work orders before the month- or period-end closing.
Even though running Periodic Costing includes reversing costs, correcting issues, and so on; it is an effective method to correct issues on a smaller scale. You can use Periodic Costing as a separate checking tool too to check, for example, when a unit cost has changed. Periodic Costing reports reveal the change. And, since you can run Periodic Costing on a transient layer, it can be removed without permanent committal to the system.
• You should establish a detailed period-end schedule that includes:
• A structured timetable of due dates and frequency
• Closing responsibilities: who does which closing task by when. Closing steps by area and activity per area are included in tables in .
• You should consider year-end closing as just another period end (peak workload period 1, budget preparation, and so on.)
• Ensure that your Periodic Costing work center rates are updated for the period for the calculation.
• Plan a time span to run the calculation.
An acceptable performance for the Periodic Costing calculating process should be approximately three hours for a database with one million inventory transactions/shop floor transactions on average per Periodic Costing period (usually, one month). Businesses with an extremely large number of transactions can expect longer processing times. Processing times do, of course, also depend on hardware configuration and database tuning.