Why can't I finish Work orders with 0 qty that have Timesheet labour costs?

KB454

Quick Answer

Because timesheet labour costs must be attributed to a finished item.

Overview

If you are finishing a Work order with a qty of 0, but timesheet labour entries have been allocated to the Work order since the last item was finished, you will receive the following error:

This is because Accentis cannot allocate the labour to a quantity that does not exist.

How does this occur?

This situation results from timesheet labour entries being added after the last item of the Work order was finished. The reason for this could include:

  • The work was actually completed before finishing the last item and should have been allocated to the Work order the last time it was finished.
  • The work was genuinely completed after the last item was finished.
  • The entry incorrectly allocated labour to the Work order when it shouldn’t have.

How to fix it in order to finish and complete the Work order

There are a few ways to correct this problem, depending on how you would prefer to proceed.

Allocate negative labour

  1. Allocate a negative amount of labour to the Work order, with the same cost as the unallocated labour.
    • This will cancel out the unallocated labour, essentially saying “this person did not do any more work”.
    • This will mean that if that labour genuinely occurred, it will not be included in the labour costings of the Work order.

Delete/alter timesheet entries

  1. Delete the timesheet entries that occurred after the last item was finished.
    • This is not always practical if the work genuinely occurred.
    • If the employee is paid by the hour, and the timesheet entries have not been included on a Pay run yet, deleting these entries may mean the employee will not get paid for hours that they did work.

This method should be used with caution and should be reserved for situations when the timesheet entry was genuinely wrong and should not have allocated any labour to the Work order.

Allocate the labour to the last finished item

This option can be used to acknowledge that the labour belonged to the last item, and that the timesheet entries were added too late.

This method is the most “correct” option as it will ensure that labour that genuinely occurred is allocated to the Work order, however, it will take the most time.

  1. Un-finish the last item on the Work order. To do this you may have to:
    • Find where the item was delivered or consumed,
    • Edit the transaction/s to make the qty 0.
      • Ensure you take note of these values first as you will need to put the values back in Step 3.
  1. Re-finish the last item on the Work order.
    • This will absorb the labour component without needing to alter any timesheet entries.

Re-dispatch or re-consume any transactions that you edited in order to un-finish the Work order in step 1.

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Last edit: 07/08/2026