As at when this post was published, we had just concluded a training and the Chart of Account cleanup for one of our clients in the telecommunication industry. They are a fast-growing smartphone and accessories enterprise whose finance is already being managed on the QuickBooks Enterprise. Of all of their challenges shared with us, the major concern was that they have outlets in different locations, both within and outside Lagos, but could not record inventory transfers in QuickBooks Enterprise when smartphones are issued from the warehouse to various sales outlet. The reason for this challenge is simple, it is simply because they were not subscribed to Advanced Inventory Module.
If you are familiar with QuickBooks Enterprise, you would know that there is a module called “Advanced Inventory”, which is an additional feature only available to subscribers. It has the added advantage of allowing you to effectively manage your inventories, set up multiple warehouses or locations, and record inventory transfers.
For a retail store with multiple warehouse or branches in different locations, inventory transfer is part of their operations as these sub-outlets expect what they sell to come from their head office, while the head office in turn records such in their book for proper accountability. Another major area is sales; considering the fact the branches are also meant to be profit centres, Management needs to track their sales performance. Categorization matters here as it will not be proper for all income earned to be treated under an account head.
The scenario painted here depicts my client’s needs. The QuickBooks Enterprise they are currently running is not subscribed to “Advanced Inventory Module” as they felt it was expensive; not because of the fee (which was $1400 for a user license), but the fact that it is a recurring bill that is not priced on a user license. Rather, it is priced on up to 30 concurrent users. Although, businesses running in Nigeria are affected by several challenges, such investment and expenses will help them get their accounting and financial management right, yet it is on the high side and it is deemed out of range for management’s budget.
Our team was invited to overhaul the challenge, and proffer a workable solution that will track inventory transfers, generate inventory report of each outlet and their sales figure on a real time.
Here are the steps we took to resolve the inventory transfer challenge:
- We asked the warehouse managers to do a physical count of all inventories in their respective locations so we can ascertain the true positions of their report.
- We imported these inventories via excel into QuickBooks and map them to inventory assets that represent different locations.
- We utilised our in-house QuickBooks customization experience spanning over 5 years to transfer inventories from one store to another, which eventually reduced the quantity in the issuing location and increased the quantity at the receiving location by the same units transferred.
We also ran a training with our client’s staffs. We helped our client to record the sales of different locations so that all the different sales outlets will be represented when they generate sales report or profit/loss account, you may want to ask if this process is as effective as the “Advanced Inventory Module”. Yes, it is very close as you have the inventory balances well represented, and you can also track the sales of each store using class.
For an instant PDF manual download on how to do inventory transfer for your multiple warehouses or stores in QuickBooks Online Plus, Pro and Premier, click here to download our practical manual for inventory transfer for non-Enterprise Users
For inquiries and support email us: bigresourcessolutions@gmail.com or info@accountingsoftware.com.ng.