Editor's Note: This is the second in a series of stories about the weirdest ways some of today's leading ProAdvisors have used QuickBooks. In "Wacky Story Wednesdays," we will recant some of the more outlandish—and creative—stories both personally and professionally? If you have a tale you'd like to share, drop us a note in the comment box.
This new series is all about the wacky ways we have been able to make QuickBooks work for our clients. In other words, you have to think "outside the box" and use QuickBooks in a non-traditional fashion to accomplish something that seems utterly inconceivable.
So, when I am asked about the weirdest thing I have used QuickBooks for, the answer is, of course, live fish.
I once had a client who was in the business of raising and selling live fish. When they contacted me, they had no idea what it would actually cost to raise an individual fish from an egg to a mature one ready for sale.
Think about it. A fish, like most livestock, is something you raise from birth to sell. It costs money to care for the little swimmers. They go from egg, larva, fry, fingerling and juvenile in various lengths (or smolts), to full-grown adult fish. You are feeding and providing for their aquatic requirements, which may be substantial depending on the species and your specific fish farm configuration.
This graphic depiction of 'growing' sizes of fish puzzles illustrates how fish mature from stage to stage and how their are costs (just like in a manufacturing assembly) at each stage in the process.
If you attempt to get an exact cost per fish, you must factor in all these expenses. With a little thinking outside the box, I concluded that I could use the QuickBooks Enterprise Assembly feature to build a fish, starting with an "Egg" assembly item for a specific fish species, then including the costs of maturing that egg to the larva stage.
Next, you create a "Larva" assembly item for the same fish species that contains the "Egg" assembly as a sub-assembly, plus the costs associated with maturing the Larva to the Fry stage.
Moving on, you create a "Fry" assembly item that contains the "Larva" assembly as a sub-assembly, along with the costs associated with maturing the Fry to the Fingerling stage.
Next on the list, you create a "Fingerling" assembly item that contains the "Fry" assembly as a sub-assembly, plus all the costs associated with maturing the Fry to the first Juvenile length you intend to sell (this might be 4-inch or 6-inch, depending on species). For example, you might designate this a Juvenile-4 or Juvenile-6
You may need to configure several different sizes of Juvenile fish if you sell them in various sizes, with each size using the previous size as a sub-assembly of the slightly larger size. Ultimately, you come to the fully mature "Adult" assembly item, which will use the largest Juvenile assembly as the sub-assembly component, plus the additional costs of maturity from that Juvenile stage to full maturity.
Not exactly a 'live fish' but this puzzle represents a good example of the variety of costs (each piece of the puzzle) that go into raising a fish at any given point in the life cycle.
Typically, you will use the "build assembly" function to create the number of fish needed when either stocking one size fish from one location into a new growing pond, or stocking mature fish into delivery tanks or trucks with a particular size to sell.
While it might have been possible to use QuickBooks Premier, the QuickBooks Enterprise Variable Build feature worked best for this functionality.
You could estimate the costs of feeding and caring for the fish to bring them to maturity from one stage to another. That's all it would have been, an estimate.
But Enterprise allows you to use Variable Build to swap out or modify components of the assembly to increase or decrease quantities or change components entirely. You could even add or delete components so that you could accurately reflect the actual costs each time you built your fish.
A more complex system that performed process manufacturing would have been far too costly for this operation, even though it could have done a better job of quality control.
Still, the QuickBooks Enterprise Assembly process we implemented performed the fundamental cost analysis. It just took some of that outside the box thinking to use Enterprise in what many would consider a "wacky way."
Okay, we want to hear from you. What's the wackiest way you ever used QuickBooks?
Submit your ideas to edit@insightfulaccountant.com.
Acknowledgments and Disclosures:
QuickBooks, QuickBooks Desktop, QuickBooks Premier, QuickBooks Enterprise and QuickBooks Online (QBO) refer to one or more registered trademarks of Intuit Inc., a publicly-traded corporation headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Any other trade names used herein refer to registered trademark products held by their respective owners. They are referenced for informational and educational purposes only.
This is an editorial feature, not sponsored content. No vendor has paid Insightful Accountant or the author remuneration of any type to be included within this feature. The article is provided solely for informational and educational purposes.