QuickBooks® 2010 For Dummies®

Chapter 7. Inventory Magic

In This Chapter

• Using the Item list to track inventory

• Keeping inventory as you purchase items

• Keeping inventory as you sell items

• Using purchase orders to help track inventory

• Adjusting inventory records to reflect what's really in stock

• Dealing with multiple inventory locations

• Taking the lazy person's approach to inventory

For small and growing businesses, inventory is one of the toughest assets to manage. First, of course, you need to physically care for stuff. Second, you have to make sure that you don't run out of some item or have too much of some other item.

QuickBooks (unfortunately) isn't all that sophisticated in its inventory management features, but it is easy to use. And with a little jiggering, you can probably get it to work in any simple case. (The one tricky part that I talk about a little later in the chapter is what you can do when you keep inventory in multiple locations, but I'm going to hold off on that discussion for a bit. That'd be like jumping off the deep end of the dock before you learn to swim.)

Tip

If you want to make inventory accounting really easy and don't care about a bit of imprecision, take a peek at the last section of this chapter, "The Lazy Person's Approach to Inventory."

Setting Up Inventory Items

Before you can track your inventory, you need to do two things. First, you need to tell QuickBooks that you want to track inventory. To do this, choose Edit

Figure 7.1. The Preferences dialog box for Purchases & Vendors.

Here's the ...