QuickBooks 2009: The Missing Manual

Chapter 19. Managing Inventory

As you record inventory purchases and sales in QuickBooks, the program keeps track of your inventory behind the scenes, just as the point-of-service systems at the grocery stores do when a cashier scans the items you buy. The seemingly automatic tracking in QuickBooks isn’t truly automatic. This chapter begins by reviewing the setup tasks that make the program work its magic.

Good inventory management means more than updating the number of items that QuickBooks thinks you have on hand. To keep the right number of items in stock, you also need to know how many you’ve sold and how many are on order. To make decisions like how much to charge or which vendor to use, you have to evaluate your purchases and the prices you pay for your inventory. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to make the most of the inventory reports that QuickBooks provides.

Another important yet challenging aspect of inventory is keeping your QuickBooks records in sync with what’s sitting on the shelves in your warehouse. Inventory can go missing due to theft and damage of all kinds, so you might not have as many products in stock as you think you do. QuickBooks can’t help much with the dusty business of rifling through boxes and counting carafes, coffee mugs, and the occasional centipede. But after the counting is complete, QuickBooks can help you adjust its records to match the reality in your warehouse. Adjusting inventory works for more than inventory counts. You can use this process ...