Accounting software for manufacturers

BOM, work orders, MRP, and the production floor

Every manufactured SKU starts as a Bill of Material — a recipe of components, sub-assemblies and overheads, with quantities and yield ratios at each level. HelloBooks supports multi-level BOMs (a finished good can roll up through three or four levels of sub-assemblies), variant BOMs (same product, different colour or size), and engineering changes that version the BOM without breaking historical job-cost reports. Work orders consume the BOM, reserve stock against the order, post issues to WIP, and capture labour and overhead at the routing step.

MRP — material requirements planning — generates purchase suggestions from the open work-order book, the sales-order book and the current stock position. The output is a list of POs to raise, with vendor, quantity and required-by date, ready for the buyer to review and convert. Shop-floor execution lets operators report production against the work order from a tablet, scan components in and out of WIP, and flag rework or scrap with reason codes that feed back into the BOM yield ratio for the next planning cycle.

Section 143 job-work, capital-goods ITC, and Rule 42/43

Many Indian manufacturers use job-workers for finishing operations — heat treatment, plating, painting, embroidery, screen printing. Under Section 143 of the CGST Act, goods sent on job-work stay in the principal's books for up to one year (three years for capital goods), the principal retains title, and ITC-04 reports the movement quarterly. Miss the return window and the goods are treated as a deemed supply with full GST liability. HelloBooks issues the job-work challan, tracks the consignment, reconciles the return against the original challan, and warns before the statutory window closes.

Capital-goods ITC under Section 16 is fully claimable on a CGST/SGST or IGST basis for new plant and machinery — but if the asset later serves a mix of taxable and exempt supplies, Rule 43 requires a monthly proportionate reversal over 60 months from the date of purchase. HelloBooks runs Rule 43 automatically: every month for the next five years the system computes the exempt-turnover ratio, reverses the proportionate ITC, and posts the reversal to GSTR-3B Table 4(B). Similarly, Rule 42 handles common-input reversals for inputs and services that serve both taxable and exempt outputs.

Job costing, quality, and the cost accountant's view

Manufacturing without job costing is guesswork. HelloBooks captures material, labour and overhead against each work order, computes the standard cost from the BOM at the time of issue, and shows variance at completion — material variance (price + usage), labour variance (rate + efficiency), and overhead variance (volume + spending). Reports roll up by product, by work centre and by customer order, so a Coimbatore pump-maker can see exactly which model is bleeding margin and a Surat textile mill can see which loom shift is underperforming. Quality inspection is built in for both incoming materials (vendor rejection trail) and in-process (rework, scrap, recoverable) — both feed back into vendor performance reports and BOM yield revisions.