QuickBooks 2005: The Missing Manual

Adjusting Inventory in QuickBooks

As you probably know, inventory can succumb to breakage, theft, and the damage caused by a paint ball fight in the warehouse. When these accidents occur, the first response is to report the loss to your insurance company. Adjusting the quantity of inventory in QuickBooks follows close behind. Similarly, if you have inventory that you can't sell, such as personal computers with 10 megabytes of disk space and 11inch monitors, adjust the inventory in QuickBooks when you take the computers to the recycling center.

An inventory adjustment is also in order after almost every physical inventory count you perform, because the quantities for inventory in the real world rarely match the quantities in QuickBooks. Shrinkage is the polite name for the typical cause of these discrepancies. To be blunt, employees, repair people, and passersby attracted by an unlocked door help themselves to a five-finger discount. And you not only take the hit to your bottom line, but you're stuck adjusting your QuickBooks records to account for the theft.

It's no surprise, then, that QuickBooks has a command for this multipurpose accounting task. Adjusting both the quantity of inventory and its value takes place in the aptly named Adjust Quantity/Value On Hand dialog box.

Fiddling with inventory that you already own might not seem like a vendor-related task, but QuickBooks keeps all inventory commands in the same place—the Vendors menu. To open the Adjust Quantity/Value On Hand ...