Stock

[Mark Phillips]

At the risk of taking you down the wrong path, I have used GNUcash to
manage a small number of items in an inventory. It has been awhile since I
did this, so there may be some gaps in my description, and I may not be
able to answer all your questions.There was a short tutorial on this
approach in the 'net - google for it. I may be able to help with some
specific questions, but mostly I just kept a separate test set of accounts
in GNUcash that I fiddled with until I figured out how to manage the
inventory correctly. I would only use this approach for an inventory of a
limited number of goods. However, it was a little easier to integrate the
inventory into GNUcash than using an external spreadsheet, which is the
only reason I used this approach.

The concept to understand is how gnucash treats financial stock
transactions. GNUcash does keep track of the number of shares purchased and
the price paid. When you sell the stock you sell both units and have a
total sales price plus other transaction costs, and you can decided how you
want to allocate the different priced stocks to expenses (ie LIFO, FIFO, or
some other way). At a bare minimum, this is what is needed for a very
rudimentary inventory.

The way to manage inventory is to think of your widgets as individual
stocks and the stock purchase price is what you paid for the widgets. Other
transaction costs for a stock purchase and sale have analogs for buying and
selling widgets as well. Go through the stock tutorial and you will see how
to buy/sell stocks. Try it in a sample GNUcash chart of accounts to see how
the transactions work for your widgets. That is how I figured out how to
make it work for me. I used this approach to manage about 25 SKUs and about
500 individual items. It worked for the three years I owned the company,
and then I sold it. If your needs are simple, and you don't want to keep a
separate spreadsheet, then try it out.

Further disclaimer - I am not an accountant, so this approach will not meet
any accounting standards in your region! Again, working with inventory this
way is very rudimentary and not supported by GNUcash nor the mailing list
(unless you make the mental translation between widgets and stocks before
you pose a question).

There are lots of free open source ERP systems out there that you could
use. There were just too much of an overkill for my application. I was
already using GNUcash and I didn't want to switch to another accounting
program.

Good luck!

Mark

On Sat, Feb 14, 2015 at 7:14 AM, Mike or Penny Novack <
stepbystepfarm at mtdata.com> wrote:

> On 2/14/2015 12:57 AM, Jill Terry wrote:
>
>> Thanks folks.  Seeing "Stock" in the menu I though perhaps it could.
>> That's a shame, I was really hoping to move my business over to GnuCash.
>>
>> Jill
>>
> Words that have more than one meaning can always cause this kind of
> confusion. The "stock" in this case meaning "equities" (shares of a
> corporation) as opposed to "inventory".
>
> A complete business system can involve MUCH more than just the accounting
> package. Depending on the sort of business might be packages that do
> "inventory", "point of sales", "billable hours" (both externally as charged
> to clients and internally tracking the work of associates), etc. The
> complete business system, often sold customized to the sort of business
> would have something to integrate these different kins of record keeping
> with the accounting part. In large business systems these would be by
> "feeds" (in a large business system, those using it only can access the
> portions within their authorization*).
>
> AFAIK there aren't any open source projects either trying to construct
> such integrated systems, possibly by combining the work of separate teams
> doing this or that part. This would be a difficult project for open source
> as in the other "world" development usually driven by potential customer
> (enough that would buy this set of packages to pay for the development --
> if the needs of your sort of business needs something else, too bad)
>
>
>
> Michael D Novack, FLMI
>
> * For example, the clerk at the checkout line is entering data into a
> "point of sales" system but you would NOT want that clerk to be doing the
> same to the financial books!
>
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