Method Community

Inventory Items belonging to the "Group" Type are displaying $0.00 Cost when they are used in Estimates, both on-screen and on the Method-generated quote forms.

Is there a fix for this?

Group item types are very critical to the operation of my company.

 Hello,

Welcome to our forum! Once you add the Group Item, update your grid and click on Save, the estimate then goes into QuickBooks (provided your QuickBooks is opened). Once this estimate syncs with QuickBooks you can then select the estimate in Method and you'll be able to see the Inventory items in that group and their costs displayed in Method. The key here, is that it first have to sync with QuickBooks then it would show up in Method, just like the Estimate number. Let me know if this works for you.

RuggedNotebooks -

I'll add a little more to this too.  This is a limitation of the built-in method screens that they don't do this automatically.  I think they could in the future, but right now it's a bit of a technical challenge to do it just like QuickBooks on our Method grids.

You have two options for customization:

1. You could modify the action on the Item dropdown that it calculates the price of the group item by getting a total of the QTY * Price for each item in that group, and then display this amount next to the group.  The downfall with this is you wouldn't get all the items listed that make up that group until you sync with QB.

2. You could have a dropdown list below the grid that lists group items, and then an Add button next to it.  If you do this you could insert the item in the grid and along with all the items that make up group item.

I know........neither of these are optimal.

Paul

Amanda,

Thank you for taking the time on Friday to help trouble shoot this problem.

For others: Method will not calculate the sales price of an item contained in a Group unless that item not only has a Sale Price but a Purchasing Cost  as well.  This is the problem that plagued me for a couple of days.

However, as discussed, one problem still remains.  In QB, you have the option of hiding a Groups contents, so as to keep the assembly parts and services hidden from the customer on your forms (estimates, invoices, etc.).  In Method, however, the Group's contents are shown and there appears to be no way to disable it.

Again, as much as Groups are an integral part of our business model, hiding a group's contents and ONLY showing the Group's description and aggregate price is the desired way we'd like to present our estimates to our clients.  What can you guys suggest to fix that?

Hello RuggedNoteBooks,

I'm looking into the possibility and I'll get back to you.

Hi RuggedNoteBooks,

If you'd like to see the total of the group items next to the group then you'll have to follow the 1st customization option Paul provided above. As he noted, this is not optimal, due to the limitation of the built-in Method screens, but it is an alternative that could work.

With regards to hiding the group items on a report, you'll need to modify the Estimate report. You can use the existing Estimate report and edit the DetailReport section. Add a Filter String, so that EstimateLineGroupRecordID is less than 1. This means that it would return 0 record for the items in a group on the report.

In your case since you are not checking 'Print items in group' then you don't have to worry about a second condition. For other users, who may be using a combination of showing items in a group and for some groups you do not show their items, you would want to add another filter where IsPrintItemsInGroup equals true.

Hope this helps.

 Has there been a fix for this yet?  We need to create estimates using groups and do not want to print the group items in most cases-maybe all.  But....we do want the total cost of the group to show on the estimate to the right of the Group item description.  At this point it shows a zero cost but the cost does show up in the Total at the bottom of the estimate.  Assuming QB is running almost all of the time, what would be the specific steps to accomplish this?

I think I already modified the Estimate report to not print group items as those items do not show up.  The Group is set in QB to no print items.  Does that mean that Method does not follow what that setting is in QB?

Thanks, Gary

Hi Gary-

If you use the Estimate(Custom) template to print estimates this functionality is built into it.

GaryK:

The Group is set in QB to no print items.  Does that mean that Method does not follow what that setting is in QB?

Method does follow this setting based on the item that is selected but this is set up on the estimate template itself.

-MIchael