Reconciling an Inventory Period

At least once a year, end users are required to perform an inventory reconciliation to remain in PDMA compliance. Users might also need to perform an inventory reconciliation if they are receiving a promotion or leaving the company. For more information on reconciliation, see Inventory Reconciliation.

Prior to starting inventory reconciliation, users must perform certain inventory reconciliation prerequisite steps as outlined in the following image.

These inventory reconciliation prerequisite steps must be performed in the following order:

• Verify previous inventory periods are reconciled. End users must reconcile previous inventory periods in chronological order. This is only a concern if a company’s configuration allows more than one inactive, unreconciled period. For more information, see Acknowledging Full Receipt of a Samples Transfer.

• Acknowledge receipt of inventory transfers. End users must send acknowledgements for all received sample inventory shipments. For more information, see Acknowledging Full Receipt of a Samples Transfer.

• Create transfer transactions for transferred samples. End users must create transfer transactions for any samples transferred to another representative or returned to the home office. For more information, see Creating a Samples Transfer.

• Mobile users synchronize with server database. Mobile end users must synchronize their local database with the server database before submitting an inventory count. This is especially important if they are recording samples received in a prior period or to be received in a future period. For more information on synchronizing a local database, check with your Siebel administrator.

  Note: Counts for transferred and received samples are not reflected in the inventory count until their records have been submitted.

An inventory period cannot be reconciled if any discrepancy exists between the physical and electronic counts. If a discrepancy exists, it must be corrected before a user can reconcile the period. For more information, see the procedure Identifying Discrepancies in Inventory Counts.

The following image shows the steps involved in the reconciliation process.

The inventory reconciliation steps must be performed in the following order:

• Create and submit a closeout inventory count. End users must create and submit an inventory count (either by product or lot number) of the products currently on-hand. For more information, see the procedure Creating and Submitting a Closeout Inventory Count.

  End users cannot submit a count differently from the way they submitted the previous period’s count unless the previous period has been reconciled. For example, if they submitted the previous period’s count by product name, they must reconcile that period before they can submit a subsequent count by lot number.

• Correct physical and electronic count discrepancies. End users must correct any discrepancies between the physical counts and the electronic counts by:

  • Creating and submitting a sample adjustment transaction with one or more line items. For more information, see the procedure Adjusting Multiple Quantities with a New Adjustment Transaction.

    This method allows end users to adjust the inventory counts of multiple products with a single adjustment transaction (containing multiple line items). However, they might want to use this method if they need to adjust more than two or three counts.

  • Adjusting previous transactions. Adjusting line-item records of previously entered transactions. For more information, see the procedure Adjusting the Quantity in a Samples Transaction.

  This method allows end users to adjust the quantity of a selected line item in a previously entered transaction. However, they might want to use this method if they only need to adjust one or two counts.

• Reconcile the inventory period. For more information, see the procedure Reconciling an Inventory Period.