QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Performing a Physical Inventory

Although QuickBooks can calculate how many products you have on hand based on your purchases and sales, it has no way of knowing what's happening back at your warehouse. Employees help themselves to products; fire consumes some of your inventory; or a burst pipe turns your India ink sketches into Rorschach tests. Only a physical count of the items you keep in stock tells you how many units you really have to sell.

QuickBooks does the only thing it can to help you count your inventory—it provides the Physical Inventory Worksheet report, which lists each inventory item in your Item List and how many units should be in stock. To see it, choose Reports→Inventory→ Physical Inventory Worksheet.

The Physical Count column has blank lines, so you can write in how many you find in storage. As you can see in Figure 16-5, the Physical Inventory Worksheet includes columns that have nothing to do with physically counting your inventory. If you want to nix those columns, you have to export the worksheet to Excel, as described in the figure.

Figure 16-5. Top: Your preferred vendor has nothing to do with counting inventory, yet the column appears on the Physical Inventory Worksheet. Unfortunately, you can't modify the columns that appear. Nor can you sort the inventory items, for instance to list them by the warehouse aisle in which they reside. If you want to create a ...