QuickBooks financial software is not a retail inventory management program, although it does have
the capability of managing inventory for a very small store provided that it is set up properly and that everyone is aware
of the limitations of the reporting.
If you have a brick and mortar
retail store and want to be able to manage your inventory, QuickBooks Point of Sale integrated with QuickBooks Financial software
is for you click the box shot link above to learn more about it.
Setting up a retail store's
inventory on QuickBooks Point of Sale can take as little as a day provided that you are organized, have a complete physical
inventory and use the Excel Data Import tool.
There are three different versions of QuickBooks Point of Sale (Basic, Pro and Pro MultiStore), and you can easily
upgrade from one version to the next with a simple phone call to unlock the software.
I recommend starting the implementation with the organization decision of the department choices, which is driven
by the type of reporting that you want to see.
The variety of retail clients that I have using the Point of Sale solution varies from furniture
to asphalt to fabric to gourmet to wine to clothing. The software has the capability of selling both services (like classes)
as well as inventory items (like pottery). It's suitable for many, many types of businesses but it is not suitable for a restaurant.
If you are like many retailers, selling on eBay, Amazon,
your own website and with a brick and mortar store(s), I would recommend that you look at T-Hub, a wonderful, inexpensive
solution to managing your sales and inventory.
Here are a couple of tips regarding QuickBooks Point of Sale:
Tip 1: Use care when editing items, especially the on-hand quantity of average
unit cost of an item. These values are important for tracking inventory value and generally you should let Point of Sale documents
update these values. If you do manually edit them, Point of Sale creates ADJUSTMENT MEMOS and sends them to QuickBooks to
update inventory value! I don't recommend that you ever edit those fields.
Tip 2. Check out Rating and Trends in company preferences. I prefer selecting the information shown based on profit.
Tip 3. Right click on the icon bar. Customize it to suit your business needs.
Tip 4. Use the Print Designer. Great
things can be done there!
Tip 5. Carefully review the selections for customizing the Dashboard. It's a complete planning
tool.
Tip 6. Make sure that you are performing regular (weekly or biweekly) maintenance on the computers running point
of sale.
Tip 7. Once a PO has been closed, delete it. If you are working with multi stores, deleting the PO prevents
it from being sent to remote stores on future Store Exchanges. This keeps the PO file compact and helps speed up the time
it takes to create and send/receive Store Exchange mailbags. It also removes the PO from the remote stores PO list on the
next exchange, helping keep it compact and efficient as well.
Tip 8. Even the large retailers use Beat Yesterday,
a paper system for retail math. Here is a link to paper worksheets to manage that: http://retail.about.com/library/forms/comp-sales-form.pdf
