QuickBooks 2016 All-in-One For Dummies

Chapter 3

Tracking Inventory and Items

In This Chapter

• Viewing your Item list
• Expanding the Item list
• Changing items
• Modifying physical counts and inventory values
• Modifying prices and price levels
• Dealing with a manufacturing firm’s inventory

If you’ve worked with QuickBooks, you won’t be surprised to hear that the Item list is a key piece of your QuickBooks accounting system. The Item list identifies each of the things that you sell. The Item list also identifies other things that appear in your invoices and — if you use them — purchase orders.

In this chapter, I talk about how you work with the QuickBooks Item list — more specifically, how you look at and use the information in the Item list to track and tally what you sell. I explain how to add information to the list and how to edit information that’s already in the list. What’s more, I talk about three accounting tasks that are related to your Item list: adjusting physical inventory accounts for inventory shrinkage or spoilage, adjusting price levels of your inventory items, and (if you manufacture inventory) using QuickBooks to handle inventories of manufactured goods.

Looking at Your Item List

QuickBooks provides a bunch of ways to see the information that you’ve stored in your Item list. You may already know some of this stuff if you’ve worked with QuickBooks a bit; some of it may be new to you. In any case, the next sections review the nearly half-dozen ways that you can see the items in your Item list.

Using ...