QuickBooks 2013 For Dummies

Special Tips for Retailers

Are you a retailer? If so, you’re probably saying, “Hey, idiot, what you just described is way too much work to do every time someone walks into the store and buys some $3 item.”

You know what? You’re right. So here’s what retailers do to record their sales. Retailers record the day’s sales by using one, two, or three sales receipt transactions. Retailers don’t record each individual sales receipt transaction.

Say that some coffee mug retailer sold 2,500 red coffee mugs for the day for $3.50 each. In that case, at the end of the day, the retailer needs to record total sales of $8,750 and then the sales tax. (In my example here, sales tax is 9.5 percent.) With these example numbers, the daily sales would be recorded using a sales receipt transaction like the one shown earlier in Figure 5-2.

Pretty straightforward, right? And that’s not too much work, all things considered.

Let me share a handful of other tips for recording retail sales:

You probably want to record a sales receipt transaction for each deposit you make. In this manner, you can indicate that a particular sales receipt transaction (really a batch of sales) is deposited at one time into your bank account — which makes reconciling your bank account relatively easy.

You probably want to separate ...