inventory management examples or links

Mon Feb 12 22:56:33 EST 2018

Gnucash can easily track inventory valuations. You can set up asset accounts for various needed inventory categories as desired and expense accounts for Costs of Goods Sold, Damaged/Spoiled inventory, Free Samples, etc.

What it cannot do with ease, is track quantities on hand. That really should be handled by separate inventory management software. Even most ‘integrated packages’ keep the accounting and inventory management functions separate. Technically even in Quickbooks, these are separate modules. One of my clients used to use QB for inventory management and it was a pain. The functionality is very limited and the reporting quite basic. My first job for them was sourcing and installing proper inventory (and Point of Sale) software for their industry.

Most integrated packages are also not very good at the type of proper analytical reporting needed for proper inventory management. If your stock offerings are that simple, just use a spreadsheet.

If you’re using Woocommerce, there are plenty of inventory management plugins available. They should all be able to print/export activity reports which you can use to enter valuation transactions such as Cost of Goods Sold and Purchases.

(there are also some advanced reporting plugins for Woo that allow you to enter costs for products and get a COGS column on your sales reports that you can use in whatever your accounting software might be)

If you are really adventurous I’ve seen a few threads on here about abusing the stock/fund account types to fit a square peg into the proverbial round hole, but after reading them over, the amount of time it would take and still not get a proper inventory management system, to me, is just not worth the hassle.

Regards,
Adrien

> On Feb 12, 2018, at 6:25 AM, Bert Heijne <BertHeijne at outlook.com> wrote:
> 
> Hello All.
> 
> This is a nice treat about Inventory but are there some “real examples”  or “ putting it all together”  of gnucash for Inventory or stock of goods management?
> And how this is covered with the invoice.
> I now that gnu cash is not build for that but small stock would be nice
> Woocommerce webshop is in construction so this will be covered mostly by WC.
> 
> Would be nice to see some real samples in gnucash to study.
> Any links or G search links  would be nice
> 
> Gr. Bert
> 
> Verzonden met Windows Mail
> 
> Van: Robert Heller<mailto:heller at deepsoft.com>
> Verzonden: ‎zondag‎ ‎11‎ ‎februari‎ ‎2018 ‎17‎:‎15
> Aan: stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com<mailto:stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com>
> CC: gnucash-user at gnucash.org<mailto:gnucash-user at gnucash.org>
> 
> At Sun, 11 Feb 2018 10:55:58 -0500 stepbystepfarm at dialup4less.com wrote:
> 
>> 
>> On 2/11/2018 9:03 AM, Robert Heller wrote:
>>> At Sun, 11 Feb 2018 08:15:56 +0100 Jeff Abrahamson <jeff at p27.eu> wrote:
>>> ....... transfer
>>> "money" from the vegetable account to a bank account (income when you sell
>>> vegetables) and when you transfer money from a bank account to the vegetable
>>> account (an expense when you buy vegetables). *I* do this which my inventory
>>> of thumb drives. GnuCash does not have "inventory" accounts or any way of
>>> dealing with inventory as such
>> Inventory MANAGEMENT is something else (gnucash lacks this but that
>> belongs in an inventory system*, not "general ledger".
> 
> Yes, I understand.
> 
>> 
>> But you are saying that gnucash does not support inventory value and
>> cost accounting and that is simply not so.
> 
> Only in the sense of not specificly labeling things as "inventory value and
> cost accounting". You are right, one can use gnucash to "manage" inventory
> value and cost accounting. From the point of a newbie, there isn't a specific
> menu of things relating to inventory value and cost accounting, so there is
> the *appearence* of a of lack of support for inventory. My intent was to point
> the OP in "right direction", one that is not obvious. Inventory value and cost
> accounting is handled in GnuCash under "other names" -- it is a matter of
> understanding that inventory is really a kind of asset (that is bought and
> sold) and can (should) be treated as such, at which point all of pieces fall
> into place. The OP wanted to treat his inventory as income or expense and that
> what was confusing (to him).
> 
>> 
>> Let's say incidental to its main activity an organization sells various
>> things (tee shirts, coffee mugs, etc.) as a fund raiser. You create
>> under Assets (after "current assets" and "fixed assets") a parent
>> "Inventory of goods". Under that might be accounts (more likely also
>> parents as batches of goods might have different basis) for "tee
>> shirts", "coffee mugs", etc. When the organization buys a new batch of
>> tee shirts that is a debit to "tee shirts" (or as I mentioned, perhaps
>> "tee shirts batch 4" --- the account description can include what the
>> unit price was for this batch) and a credit to checking << note: we get
>> confused using the supposedly more user friendly terms worrying about
>> what sort of "transfer" this is). Each sale of a tee shirt not only
>> debits cash and credits "sale of tee shirts" for the sale price but also
>> debits "cost of goods sold" and credits the inventory account "tee
>> shirts batch N" for the unit cost of batch N << going to be a policy
>> decision whether to simply use FIFO or to actually worry about from
>> which batch that shirt came. Maybe BOTH come into play. To use your
>> example, thumb drives, you might have 8 Gb drives (batches of those) and
>> 16 Gb drives (batches of those) so you might want under "thumb drives"
>> children "8 Gb drives" and "16 Gb drives" and under each of those "batch
>> 1, batch2, etc. and use FIFO there >>
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> Michael D Novack
>> 
>> * The data kept here things like "number on hand", "physical location
>> where shelved", "reorder point", etc.
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