Quick Books® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 3. Tracking Inventory and Items

In This Chapter

• Looking at your Item list

• Using the Item List window

• Adding items to the Item list

• Editing items

• Adjusting physical counts and inventory values

• Adjusting prices and price levels

• Inventory in a manufacturing firm

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 on your invoices and — if you use them — on your 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 on the Item list. I explain how to add information to the list and how to edit information already on 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, how the new version of QuickBooks handles manufactured goods.

Looking at Your Item List

QuickBooks provides a bunch of different 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 half-dozen ways that you can see the items on your Item list.

Using the Item column

One important ...