[GNC] inventory

[Adrien Monteleone]

GnuCash is not designed to handle inventory. You can certainly make the necessary accounting transactions, but you can’t easily track individual product quantities or place them on invoices or bills. (invoices/bills do have an auto-fill feature though that may help save typing.)

Some have managed to ‘abuse’ other parts of GnuCash to mimic an inventory system. Do a web search and specifically a list archive search for ‘inventory’. You’ll likely find more threads telling you that you can, than HowTo replies, but I have seen a few suggestions over the years.

If you stick with trying to do everything in GnuCash, you’ll probably want to turn off the preference to ‘Accumulate Splits on Posting’. This will cause your bills and invoices to post each line item to the respective registers which will make detailed reporting later on *much* easier. Otherwise, there is no easy way to get to the line item data contained in bills/invoices.

The usual recommendation is to use an outside inventory management program or a spreadsheet that can export the necessary accounting transactions for you to import into GnuCash, doing all the inventory management independently.

Note, if your inventory app also can generate invoices those can be imported into GnuCash for AR management. There are a few open source apps that can handle this but may require their own learning curve and extensive customization. If your needs are rather simple, I’ve seen plenty of spreadsheets out there that can handle inventory and invoicing. You would just need to add (maybe) a formatted sheet to be used to import your invoices into GnuCash and/or your other inventory accounting transactions. (like purchasing, waste, etc.)

Regards,
Adrien



> On Feb 26, 2020 w9d57, at 7:20 PM, Clayton Bulice <cbulice at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Is there a way to create an inventory "data base" so that I can easily put
> the items I am selling into an invoice? Will price editor work?