Furniture is manufacturing with options: the same sofa in forty fabrics, the same table in three woods and four lengths, some built to stock and most built to order. Costing that correctly, buying lumber, foam, fabric and hardware ahead of demand, and selling through a showroom, dealers and a website at the same time is what a furniture ERP has to do. Tellency does it on one ledger.
Generic manufacturing software assumes a fixed bill of materials and a forecastable product. Furniture breaks both assumptions. These are the capabilities that make the difference between a system that fits the shop and one the shop fights.
A single sofa model is sold in many combinations of fabric, leg finish and cushion fill, each with its own material cost and labor. Tellency treats each combination the shop offers as a product variant with its own bill of materials, so the fabric consumption for that cover, the finish for those legs and the hardware for that mechanism carry their own cost, rolled up on the quote before the order is accepted.
Most furniture makers build the core range to stock and everything else to order, on the same benches with the same people. Tellency runs both: stock replenishment work orders driven by minimums and forecasts, and order-driven work orders that carry the customer, the options and the promised date, all scheduled against the same capacity and consuming the same lumber, foam, fabric and hardware inventory.
Hardwood is bought by the board foot and consumed by the piece, fabric by the roll and consumed by the yard or metre, foam by the sheet, hardware by the thousand. Lead times run to months for imported fabric and hardware. Tellency handles multiple units of measure per item, tracks stock by lot and location, suggests purchase orders from open sales orders and minimums, and allocates material to work orders when they are scheduled.
A furniture manufacturer sells retail from a showroom, wholesale to dealers on their own price lists and terms, and increasingly direct to consumers online, often with deposits and long delivery windows. Tellency runs POS for the showroom, dealer accounts with contract pricing and credit terms, and online orders that reserve production capacity, with customer deposits held on the balance sheet until delivery.
Furniture is heavy, delivered in stages and often installed. Tellency records deliveries against the order as they happen, tracks freight against the order, schedules delivery with the customer, bills installation as a service on the same invoice, and it tracks damage claims and replacements against the original order.
Work in progress, finished goods and cost of goods sold have to reconcile at month-end, and that only happens when material, labor and overhead post to the work order and the ledger at the same time. Tellency does exactly that, so the accountant sees margin by model, by option and by channel from the same books that close the month. US sales tax by jurisdiction, Canadian GST/HST/PST/QST by place of supply and multi-currency for imported materials are handled on the same ledger.
Your fabrics, your finishes, your material costs and your labor rates, set up in a dedicated instance, with a go-live date attached.
