As I only used Manager for tax purposes I feel don’t need to make each product I buy an individual entry in Manager. I find it takes a lot of time for no benefit. Is it ok to group all different items on an invoice and label it as a single item just using the name stock?
To give some perspective, I operate vending machines and a typical invoice from my wholesaler will have a range of entries from chips to drinks to chocolates. Although I can see the benefit of detailed financial analysis I already have that with stock management software on the machine. I don’t require a detailed record of stock on hand as I can accurately enough just look at the different stacks of products in my store room and know when I need to buy more stock.
Thanks. The credit card payment system has provision for that type of data collection which is automatically updated in real time with each sale be it credit card or coins and notes. It doesn’t go as far as accounting for spoilage or theft but it’s good enough to get a clear enough picture to make decisions on.
If you are not going to take advantage of other inventory management aspects of Manager, there is no requirement to have even one inventory item or enable the Inventory Items tab at all. From the perspective of keeping track of taxes on sales and purchases, you can treat your inventory the same way you do petrol for a delivery truck, rent for an office, mobile telephone service, or any other business expense.
Can you explain your thinking further, @Joe91? What I was describing is to simply treat the snacks being purchased as consumable supplies. Why would accounts need to be closed? Buying 1,000 worth of candy bars and selling them for 2,000 is no different from a financial perspective from buying 1,000 of cleaning supplies to maintain a hotel in which you rent rooms for 2,000. (Set aside any legal or accounting standard requirements for inventory reporting.)
I had a similar “problem” with accounts for a non-profit making company.
We have stocks in a bar but we had no need to keep track of individual purchases, sales and inventory of individual drinks/products.
We elected to go with no inventory items but when we produce our annual accounts we need to account for our closing stock of bar products. We do this with a journal entry at the year end
Debit Inventory on hand
Credit Purchases
so that our bar profits are correct. We don’t do this on a monthly basis as it is a very minor part of our business.
We then have another journal entry to open the year to reverse the closing journal entry
We could just ignore it as the stock levels don’t really change much year on year but in the interests of accuracy, we do a stock take once a year