Continuing our thread of improvements to this year’s version of QuickBooks Enterprise, today we are talking about the brand new Landed Cost feature for QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum tier. This new feature is available in both the US and Canadian versions of QuickBooks Enterprise.

Landed cost has been a bit of a tricky thing to pin down for business owners historically. According to QuickBooks, “[Landed Cost] provides greater visibility into actual product costs by factoring in freight, duties, insurance and other miscellaneous costs by quantity, value, weight or volume.”

With this feature business owners no longer have to spend time calculating and tracking landed costs with workarounds.

For those unfamiliar with the term “Landed Costs,” these are simply the costs incurred in total, to “land” the costs at the purchaser’s door. So, when working with Cost of Goods Sold/inventory, you would want to include not only the costs of purchase, but tariff/duties, and other costs involved in receiving the goods.

Previously, calculating Landed Costs involved time intensive work arounds. Now, you can use the Advanced Inventory feature to see those accurately.

TO ENABLE LANDED COST:

1. Go to Preferences -> Items and Inventory.

2. Click on Advanced Inventory Settings.

A new tab will appear – Landed Cost. If you do not see this tab, you need to upgrade to QBES 2020. You can email me here to start the process.

3. Click on Set up landed cost account. If this is the first time you are using it, I suggest starting new, as recommended below. Use a name easy to recognize.

Since Landed Cost is a part of your inventory costs that will be sold to a customer, it is an Other Current Asset until it hits your COGS accounts (similar to Finished Goods).

4. Set up your linked items that will make up landed costs. Things like Freight, Duties, etc, will make up these items. When I tested this feature, it would not allow me to enter the items on the screen. You will have to add the items to your Item List, and then come to this screen to map them as a S&H item.

For now I selected “Add Later” and received a warning message, which I will fix in a moment, after I add the items mentioned.

TO ADD ITEMS FOR USE IN LANDED COST:

Go to your Item List. Hit New (bottom left).

Add the item as an “Other Charge”.

I mapped this item to Freight COGS. We will have to go map this as Landed Cost in the Landed Cost module next. Please note: You can map this item proactively to Landed Cost, and it will show when you return to the module. The module itself is primarily for batch mapping already existing items to Landed Cost.

Go back to Preferences -> Items and Inventory -> Landed Cost to return to the mapping area.

Click forward to the Manage Shipping & Handling Items in order to add the item we just discussed.

Our item now shows up!

If you go back to your Item List, you will see that the module has now changed the mapping on this item to Landed Cost.

I then went and created an additional S&H item and mapped it proactively to Landed Cost, so we can see it map automatically to our Landed Cost module.

You can see below that it automatically shows in the module now.

Landed Cost is now set up!