Units of Weight and Volume

When a carrier is used to deliver products from your organization to a customer, the carrier can charge your company specific freight amounts that depend on the weights or volumes of the packages in shipments. The carrier may also set restrictions on the weight or volume of packages. Landed costs incurred for shipments delivered from vendors to your company can be calculated by the weight or volume of the items in the shipment.

In MYOB Advanced, you can select the base units of measure (UOMs) for weight and volume and set up the automatic calculation of weights and volumes for sales and purchase orders. In this topic, you will read about weight and volume UOMs.

The Base Weight and Volume UOMs

You use the Companies (CS101500) form to specify the base UOMs for weight and volume.

On the Units of Measure (CS203100) form, you should first create a unit of measure (UOM) to be used in your system as the base UOM for weight. The weights of all sales and purchase orders will be calculated in this UOM. However, if the items differ in weight significantly, you can create other UOMs for measuring the weights of the base units of stock and non-stock items. For each additional weight UOM, you must specify the rules for converting this UOM to the base weight UOM.

For example, suppose that you need to create weight UOMs for a gram (GRAM) and pound (LB) and define conversion rules to convert the weights measured in pounds to weights measured in grams and to convert the weights measured in grams to weights measured in pounds. On the Units of Measure form, you would do the following:

  1. Create the GRAM UOM for grams.
  2. Create the LB UOM for pounds.
  3. Create a conversion rule from grams to pounds with the Multiply conversion type and 453.5923 conversion factor
  4. Create a conversion rules from pounds to grams with the Multiply conversion type and 0.0022046 conversion factor
    Note: Here you specify the conversion factor as 0.0022046 with 7 decimal places. This value shows how many pounds one gram contains. In your system, the decimal precision is defined in the Quantity Decimal Places box on the Companies (CS101500) form. Make sure that the selected decimal precision does not cut off any meaningful digits. For instance, if you set the number of decimal places for quantities to 2, this would result in incorrect conversions from grams to pounds.

For an activity that describes how to create UOMs and conversion rules, see Unit of Measure Creation: Implementation Activity.

On the Units of Measure form, you should define a UOM that will be used in your system to measure the volume of specific quantities of the items listed on sales and purchase orders. You should also define all other UOMs that may be used to measure the volumes that the base units of various items can take and specify the conversion factors with respect to the base volume UOM.

On the Inventory Preferences (IN101000) form, select the base weight UOM in the Weight UOM box and select the base volume UOM in the Volume UOM box.

Weight and Volume of Stock Items

For each stock item, you can specify the weight and the volume (measured in a specific volume UOM) of its base unit on the Packaging tab of the Stock Items (IN202500) form. For non-stock items, you can specify these values (if applicable) by using the Non-Stock Items (IN202000) form.

For the item-specific weight and volume UOMs, you must specify rules for conversion to the appropriate base UOMs either on the Stock Items form or on the Units of Measure (CS203100) form.

If the Multiple Units of Measure feature is enabled on the Enable/Disable Features (CS101000) form, make sure that rules for converting each sales and purchase unit to the base UOM selected for the item are defined in the system. Also, if the Use a Price Adjustment Multiplier check box is selected on the General Settings tab of the Sales Orders Preferences (SO101000) form, you can specify a price adjustment multiplier for the item. For more information on adjusting prices, see Unit of Measure Creation: General Information.

Weight and Volume Calculation for Purchase Receipts

The system can calculate the weight and volume of the received quantities of stock and non-stock items for each purchase receipt.

The landed cost specified for each purchase receipt can be split among the items listed in the receipt in proportion to the item weights or volumes (among other options). For more information, see Processing Landed Cost Documents.