Have Quickbooks but having issues.
Hi, I'm new here and happy to find this place. I'm running XP Pro with Quickbooks Pro 2005 multi-user (5 workers).
I run a small business that sells construction materials internationally. Because our typical day involves having our customers request pricing on any one of thousands of contruction products out there, our item list is growing so rapidly and quickly becoming out of control. Many of these items are also commodity items so the prices are changing daily.
Basically I have no reporting whatsoever. For example, I sell Widgets. Today the Widget pricing has changed so I manually just enter the new price in the Estimate and get an order, manually change it in the Vendor Purchase Order, and manually change it on my Customer Invoice. Imagine doing this to hundreds of items all the time. I can't do a report and see the history of the Widget pricing or item profitability. At the very least I'd like to get this under control. I couldn't even tell you what my most profitable item is margin-wise. I saw there was an add-on called Item Manager or something but haven't looked too deeply in to that. I'd love to see the item history and what I've sold that Widget for and to whom on a quick report. Many times I haven't sold a particular item in quite a while and need to price it and have no idea what I sold it for previously!
If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ear and very appreciative. TIA.
Have you looked into an automated pricing import?
SeattleCPA had a good point; You may want to consider an automated import. I'm not sure if this is available in Quickbooks, but I know that with many other database solutions this is fairly easy. We've done several for companies like electrical parts distributors, computer parts distributors, etc... that were dealing with a high volume of pricing updates on a daily basis. It can really reduce errors and save a lot of time, even if it costs a little to have it written initially.
Thanks,
Rebecca
Are your items set-up as inventory items?
Quote:
Originally Posted by Walter Mitty
Hi, I'm new here and happy to find this place. I'm running XP Pro with Quickbooks Pro 2005 multi-user (5 workers).
I run a small business that sells construction materials internationally. Because our typical day involves having our customers request pricing on any one of thousands of contruction products out there, our item list is growing so rapidly and quickly becoming out of control. Many of these items are also commodity items so the prices are changing daily.
Basically I have no reporting whatsoever. For example, I sell Widgets. Today the Widget pricing has changed so I manually just enter the new price in the Estimate and get an order, manually change it in the Vendor Purchase Order, and manually change it on my Customer Invoice. Imagine doing this to hundreds of items all the time. I can't do a report and see the history of the Widget pricing or item profitability. At the very least I'd like to get this under control. I couldn't even tell you what my most profitable item is margin-wise. I saw there was an add-on called Item Manager or something but haven't looked too deeply in to that. I'd love to see the item history and what I've sold that Widget for and to whom on a quick report. Many times I haven't sold a particular item in quite a while and need to price it and have no idea what I sold it for previously!
If anyone has any ideas, I'm all ear and very appreciative. TIA.
Are
your items setup as inventory items? If all the items you sell are set-up as inventory items you can go to the reports section and get a report on the items. Go to reports on the left hand side of the main menu and select Reports-> Sales By Item-> Summary, this report will show Average Price, Avg COGS (Average Cost of Goods Sold), Gross Margin and Gross Margin %. You can select a date range All or, This Year, Last Month etc. Also you can click on a item listed in the first report to drill down to show all sales of that item in the date range you selected, you can then even click on the individual sales to see the actual invoice.
I hope this helps,
