Thank you for your response
To be honest, i have no idea what you suggest below
I did accounting at school, 40 years ago, and all i remember is double entry
Sorry for my ignorance, but thank you
Frederick
On 2020/10/02 22:21, doncram wrote:
Hi Frederick & others -- It has often been said in this email forum
that GnuCash doesn't support inventory, but I think that's basically
wrong. What I mean is that while GnuCash has no separate inventory
module as are available in some versions of Quickbooks, say, one can
use GnuCash + a supporting spreadsheet (in Excel or freeware
LibreOffice Calc which both have some database features) perfectly
well for accounting for a business with inventory. A few
demonstrations/examples are needed to provide for arriving potential
users though.
A simple approach which might work especially if there are not too
many transactions could work as follows:
*When purchasing inventory, perhaps of a few different types*:
a) enter transaction into GnuCash as increasing one big Inventory
account and decreasing cash without any detail about numbers of units
of what types, just reference the invoice or sales receipt which you
file into a Vendor file.
b) in the spreadsheet create rows as needed for each the different
types of inventory (say Barnevelder chickens and Chantecler chickens)
and in three new columns for the purchases record the numbers and
prices paid and total dollars paid for each
Repeat as new transactions happen, adding 3 columns each time.
Keep one column carrying the sum of all purchases as an estimate of
current value of each type, with a sum at bottom reporting the total
value of inventory.
*At the end of a month or other accounting period*, do an inventory
inspection and record in a new set of 3 columns the number of each
type which you count, a price per unit (perhaps use the original or
the last purchase price, or a new estimate of your own based on what
you see and know), and a calculated current total dollars value.
Perhaps some units will have been lost or some new chicks have been
hatched and some prices will have changed, so the sum of value of
current inventory will be lower or higher. Then update your financial
value in Quickbooks to reflect the amount of that change: increase or
decrease "Inventory" value and recognize a gain (say "Gain from
Inventory growth") as income or a loss (say "Loss from Inventory
decline") as expense.
Also *whenever you sell any units*, add three columns for the numbers
sold, the price per unit, the dollars yielded. In GnuCash enter an
increase in cash and recognize "Revenue from sale of chickens" or
whatever.
In your business, you will also record expenses for operating costs,
and any revenues from sales of eggs say, and in the Income Statement
for a given period you will see whether you have made a profit or loss
on the period. In this approach, with your counting and revaluing
your inventory to roughly a current market value each period, profit
can be shown due to gains in value even if there have not been any
sales. As suggested here, the spreadsheet would tend to expand to the
right. But perhaps that is fine, as after all there is no shortage of
empty columns available in any spreadsheet nowadays.
Note there are many possible different implementations. One could
have GnuCash inventories for each type of chicken, so values for each
type would appear in your Balance Sheet, though at cost of requiring
many more GnuCash transaction entries. One could use "inventory
valuation" approaches other than the current market value estimation
approach suggested above, variations that may be legally allowed in
financial accounting (e.g. First In First Out (FIFO), LIFO, Average
Cost, Specific Identification), but are probably not worth bothering
with. These variations might allow for some gaming to advance or
defer taxes due, or to manipulate reported earnings of your firm
sooner or later, but such gaming is generally not worthwhile. Also a
more database-oriented approach to organizing the information might be
possible, say with columns for each type of chicken and one row for
each transaction or re-valuation or new total value. Perhaps that
would allow for some different types of reports using DCOUNT and DSUM
type formulas.
But perhaps the above approach would work for you? Maybe you could
explain a bit more about what you want to do?
In my opinion, Quickbooks' inventory feature is cumbersome, requiring
one to go through multiple screens to create a new inventory type, and
requiring application of just one type of valuation (I think requiring
every unit to be valued at same price per unit always, i.e. this is
suited only to situations where suppliers are unrealistically required
to sell to you at the same price forever). It does not allow one to
choose other valuation approaches. It probably fails to provide
reports that you want suited to your application. It fails to support
useful calculations that are often wanted (such as for when inventory
of each type should next be purchased and what order quantity should
be used, based on "Economic Order Quantity" theory or similar). I
know of manufacturing firms which use Quickbooks for accounting but
absolutely would never use it for inventory; they instead use a
separate spreadsheet for inventory that works for them.
Note in past discussions, as mentioned, sometimes users have been
directed to try to adapt GnuCash's feature for tracking shares of
investment trading securities (which looks up current stock prices
online, and handles stock splits, and so on), but stocks are
fundamentally different and it never works for a user to take that
approach. By the way I am in favor of several other features being
added to GnuCash to make it more widely usable, but not for an
inventory module.
Frederick, does this help?
Don Cram
On Fri, Oct 2, 2020 at 5:36 AM Derek Atkins <de...@ihtfp.com
<mailto:de...@ihtfp.com>> wrote:
Gnucash does not have inventory support.
If you only need to track a few items you can probably hack something
together using a Stock account, but it is not a true inventory.
-derek
Sent using my mobile device. Please excuse any typos.
On October 2, 2020 5:17:09 AM Duikerbos <duiker...@gmail.com
<mailto:duiker...@gmail.com>> wrote:
> Morning
>
> I am starting a small Broiler project and using GnuCash to track
> transactions
>
> Is it possible to track stock levels, birds purchased less birds
sold?
>
>
> Frederick
>
>
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