Inventory for thousands of unique items

I have just started an antique business and each of my items is unique. Do I still need to catagorize each item under a sku or can I put each one in separately? The cost of each varies and I would like to be able to expense per item and not by average cost. (I am new to this software too)

SKU’s are only one method of tracking inventory. Manager will incorporate them if you use them (in the Item code field). But each unique item needs to be a separate inventory item.

You should carefully consider, however, whether the inventory management features of Manager are right for your business at all. You will need to create an inventory item for every antique you acquire for sale. Your quantity will be 1. You will sell it and the quantity will forever be 0, but you will never be able to delete the item because there will be transactions against it. You could make sold items inactive, but what is the point? Only you can answer that question, but to me, it seems like a lot of work for something you will never sell again.

There are other methods for maintaining records in your situation, such as inventory cards.

Thanks again, very helpful. Can you further explain inventory cards?

Just a card in a file with necessary information. Nothing to do with this software, so not appropriate for discussion on this forum.

ok, got it. Does Manager always average cost out the inventory? I’m thinking that maybe I could create sku categories that are general and then enter each item to inventory on hand with it’s individual cost and then assign each item an individual serial number and when sold use the “serial number” to mark it as sold so the cogs gets posted. What do you think about this method.

Yes

Using “Bottles” as an example - this could be created as an inventory item “Bottles” and then all individual ones would be accumulated within that item. So you end up with 10 @ an avg cost of 3.00. So when you sell one, the COGS would be 3.00 even though you paid either 0.50c or 4.00 for it. You can’t have the COGS matching the specific purchase cost.

Manager does not support inventory tracking by serial number. Hence, everything recorded as being one inventory item (or code or SKU or whatever you want to call it) must be identical–for accounting purposes–to all others so recorded. You cannot have categories of items. The fundamental assumption for Manager (and all other inventory management systems I know of) is that all units of an inventory item are interchangeable.

More sophisticated systems have tiers for things like size and color, but those are, in reality, separate inventory items bundled under an umbrella number for convenience. Manager has no such capability.

Again, more sophisticated systems may allow tracking of serial numbers, batch or lot numbers, etc. But when buying and selling, the presumption of interchangeability still prevails. And Manager doesn’t have the capability to do more than record such numbers in custom fields. It won’t process anything according to content of those fields.

Thanks for all the responses and help! I will have to think about which is the best way to go with this!

Alternatively you could consider an Opening Stock, Purchases, Closing Stock process which doesn’t require the use of Inventory Items. Read this topic