Help with the Manager "plug-ins" and chart of accounts

What I do for the business - I order the manufacturing of the CDs from a third party and then sell those CDs. So as I understand I need somehow to deal with assets and their evaluation on a sale to a final customer (i.e. costs of manufacturing should decrease from the assets account when manufactured CDs are sold). At the same time I don’t really need a thoughout inventory tracking, just need to track how much money were spend on manufacturing. But when I invoice my customer I should be able to remove certain amount from the Asset section (manufacturing cost) and at the same time put the extra value to a particular CD.

Any ideas how to make it with Manager in a best way?

You said you don’t really need inventory tracking but what you are describing is inventory costing so you should use inventory.

See http://www.manager.io/guides/inventory/

When you start using inventory, your Chart of accounts will contain new accounts:

  • Sales of inventory items (income)
  • Purchases of inventory items (expense)
  • Inventory on hand (asset)

You can rename these accounts to better match your business

  • Sales (income)
  • Cost of manufacturing (expense)
  • Manufactured goods (asset)

Thank you, Lubos, for a detailed answer! I will try this way, but do I understand correctly that if I use Inventory module I am doomed to track in detail each item in my inventory - if I have it and where it goes?

Not sure what is your concern. Manager is to be used to record transactions in your business as they happen. If you maintain physical inventory, this should be reflected in Manager so your financial statements and other reports represent the true position and performance of your business.

Have you tried using inventory in Manager? It doesn’t add any significant overhead to your data entry. Without inventory, purchases would be allocated to some expense account, with inventory, you would allocate purchases to Inventory on hand account.

You can always choose not to use inventory in Manager and just make necessary adjustments by journal entries but I see no point if Manager can do (manufacturing) cost entries for you automatically as you make sales.

Hi, Lubos! Yes, i have played with Inventory a bit a month ago, will give it another try now - thanks for pointing this out!

My main problem is that I have around 1000 different products but each of them is just in 1 or 2 copies. Even adding them to inventory can be a painful task. Furthermore I do trade those items, i.e. I send some copies to other person/business and get in return some copies of other products - which means this must be also taken into account in Manager if I understood all corretly.

You said you order manufacturing of CDs. That doesn’t sound like 1 or 2 copies. How come you end up with just 1 or 2 copies?

Because I trade the stuff with other small manufacturers of CDs (record labels) - so in the beginnig I have say 1000 copies of the same article, but in a course of a time due to trading it turns to say 500 different articles and 500 same articles.

If those items are of the same (or very similar) cost, then you can treat them as the same inventory item in Manager. This means if you trade with someone, you don’t have to do anything in Manager.

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Yeah, I though of the solution like that - to have say inventory items for different CDs which I have in big quantities, and some “General CD” inventory item for the rest and assume some average price on them. Thanks!