Inventory Week #1 re-do

This Wednesday's workshop will start with the basics, and a story. The story will be about a retail store, which stocks toys and trains. We'll look at how to set up the Items, how to assemble some of the Items into a Train Set just in time for the Christmas toy sale season.

We'll also look at how to Group Items to record a quick sale of a group of products, but you'll be able to sell the individual Items at the same time.

In next week's session, we'll buy more inventory, and I'll also show you how to record the sales from the cash register till tape if you don't want to record individual sales during the day.

The final session on November 28th will be about reconciliation and reporting for the toy store.

The reason we're starting over is that I tried a top down approach, looking at the big picture, examining all the different types of inventory that there are, and showed you how each would need to be accounted for separately.

If you'd not had any experience with inventory, this would probably have blown you away, and if it did, I apologize. If on the other hand, it gave you an appreciation of the breadth and scope of how much there is to inventory accounting, that's a good thing. Knowing there are various types of inventory and that it's necessary to record the income transactions separately for each type of Inventory asset is a good step in the right direction.  Attempting to reconcile purchases when you've used both Inventory Parts and Non Inventory Parts and mixed it all up together is going to cause your year end accountant no end of headaches.

Not only do retailers account for inventory, so do manufacturers.  They bring in raw materials, add labour, other materials, and create products, which sometimes are partially finished, what we call work in progress and then finally as 'finished goods'. We won't be looking at manufacturing, but we will look at assembly with some labour and packaging, just to give you an idea of how QuickBooks could handle such transactions.

Hope you weren't scared off by the complexity and that you'll come back to start at the beginning again.