I recently worked with a client, helping her set up inventory control using QuickBooks Pro. My client has a horse and farrier supply business in Chino Valley, north of Prescott, Arizona. The business, Four Shoes Saddles and Tack, offers a full selection of shoes, nails, rasps, specialty pads and shoeing equipment.
To begin inventory set up, we first modified the Chart of Accounts in QuickBooks. We did this so that the inventory items that she would import into QuickBooks would be assigned to “Cost of Goods Sold” accounts that would provide her with the costing detail she needed.
Then we set up inventory items in QuickBooks to match the items she planned to import from the Excel spreadsheet that listed all of her inventory items. This involved creating items, sub-items, and sub-items of the sub-items, so that she would later be able to run reports that would give her the detail level she needed to track her sales by item and category.
We then modified her Excel spreadsheet, so that the all of the headings matched the headings in the QuickBooks item list. Units of measurement also needed to be changed to match the units of measurements used in the QuickBooks item list.
Once we were done with this mapping, now it was time to import over 1,000 inventory items into QuickBooks. This took some time, as we got many error messages, since the descriptions and units of measurement did not always exactly match in Excel and QuickBooks.
Finally all of the items were imported into QuickBooks. It took a while, but in the end, it worked out great!
