I have a new retail customer (Ace Hardware store), that we will be installing QuickBooks. Our question involves his inventory. At this time he is using a custom program that will crash 1/1/00, so main motivation for QuickBooks is compliance. He does not track his inventory piece by piece, but by 12 departments (they will become his items). However he manages his inventory by dollar amount and reduces it by a percentage of the sale. For example, Department 1 (58%) has sales of $100 today; he will now reduce his inventory by $58. How can I set up an Invoice/Daily Sales form to record the sales in each department and also reduce his inventory? Should I even use the Inventory feature, or could I use the new link to Excel to accomplish this. I would like to do as much as possible in QuickBooks, but at this time he would be open to other software if necessary.
I have a new retail customer (Ace Hardware store), that we will be installing QuickBooks. Our question involves his inventory. At this time he is using a custom program that will crash 1/1/00, so main motivation for QuickBooks is compliance. He does not track his inventory piece by piece, but by 12 departments (they will become his items). However he manages his inventory by dollar amount and reduces it by a percentage of the sale. For example, Department 1 (58%) has sales of $100 today; he will now reduce his inventory by $58. How can I set up an Invoice/Daily Sales form to record the sales in each department and also reduce his inventory? Should I even use the Inventory feature, or could I use the new link to Excel to accomplish this. I would like to do as much as possible in QuickBooks, but at this time he would be open to other software if necessary.
To track inventory by department rather than piece-by-piece, you're probably better off using non-inventory parts in conjunction with period inventory adjustments. The problem with using Inventory Parts is that when you purchase an Inventory Item, QuickBooks tracks what you pay and it recalculates the "average cost" of that Inventory Part. Every time you sell the item, it reduces Inventory by this AVERAGE COST of the item. But what you're want it to do is reduce inventory by a fixed percentage of the sales price. There is really no way to automatically do that. You can do an inventory adjustment for each sale, but I'm sure you don't want to do that. So, go with non-inventory parts combined with journal entries to record the reduction of inventory (daily, weekly, quarterly, or annually). The inventory adjustment could be taking right of the total sales by item (multiply total sales for each item by the percentages you show below).