[GNC] How to handle inventory assets in GnuCash?

[Eric Chapman]

Thanks, John,

At this point, our needs for this are indeed simple. But I could see 
them getting more complex in the future. I do understand cost accounting 
and loved it when I studied it years ago.

I wonder if there are stand-alone inventory management programs/apps 
that would work if our needs become more complex. If anyone knows of any 
worth researching, please let me know.

The set of books I'm looking at this for is for a very small market 
gardening (farming) operation which started in 2022. Only sold their own 
produce in 2022. But later may branch out to sell stuff bought from 
others, or – to complicate things more – may start producing prepared 
products like jams, jellies, breads, even crafts and such for sale. Then 
the cost accounting gets much more involved.

So I'm just researching and trying to look ahead to what may be needful 
in the future.

Eric
GnuCash 4.13 on MacOS 13.1 Ventura installed on 2018 Mac Mini (3.2 GHz 
6-Core Intel Core i7)

On 12/20/22 11:45, john wrote:
>
>> On Dec 20, 2022, at 6:55 AM, Eric Chapman <ecnews at etchapman.com> wrote:
>>
>> I am wondering how, in GnuCash, to account for assets bought to resell or other assets that will later be expensed as used.
>>
>> I'm in the USA context. As far as terminology goes, I think UK and other English speaking locales use the word "stock" to refer to inventory, but, in my experience, that is not common in the USA (indeed, the first definition of "stock" from Apple Dictionary: "the goods or merchandise kept on the premises of a business or warehouse and available for sale or distribution"; that is basically the definition of "inventory" at the bottom of the wiki article referred to below). I will try to use the word "inventory" so I do not confuse the term I'm talking about with the one meaning ownership securities of a company ("He owns 100 shares of XYZ Company stock.").
>>
>> I found something relevant in the wiki: https://wiki.gnucash.org/wiki/Inventory_Handling. Best I can tell, GnuCash does not have any dedicated way to handle inventory flows: purchases, sales, revaluations for market fluctuations, identification of lots/batches).
>>
>> If I want to deal with inventory now in GnuCash v. 4.13, any best practices? I'm not talking about massive amounts of items or quantities.
>>
> Unless your use case is very simple indeed best practice is to use a different program. You'd need to study cost accounting and do it by hand in GnuCash.
>
> Regards,
> John Ralls
>