QuickBooks 2013 For Dummies

Dealing with Multiple Inventory Locations

If you’ve read this chapter to this point, you’ve seen now how QuickBooks handles your inventory. With rather elegant simplicity, but for many businesses, QuickBooks gets the job done.

Unfortunately, I’ve encountered a real headache when using the most common versions of QuickBooks for inventory. What if you store inventory in multiple locations — for example, in a Michigan warehouse and in a Chicago distribution facility? Or in a couple of retail locations — one on the right side of the tracks and the other one on the wrong side of the tracks?

The problem is that QuickBooks is set up to deal with a single inventory location. So although you can know how much inventory you have in total, if you aren’t careful, you won’t know how much is in Michigan and how much is in Chicago. And you can’t even really check on inventory shrinkage because QuickBooks’ records don’t tie to location-specific inventory counts.

Now I need to tell you upfront that you don’t have any cheap, good way to deal with this in versions of QuickBooks other than QuickBooks Enterprise Solutions. Throughout the following sections, though, I explain a couple of sloppy fixes and one rather expensive but very robust fix (upgrading to the Enterprise Solutions version of QuickBooks) you can do.

Manually keep separate inventory- by-location counts

If you have only a handful of items ...