Turning on Advanced Inventory in QuickBooks Enterprise

Many of our posts are based in QuickBooks Enterprise and require Advanced Inventory to be on (required Platinum or higher subscription). To turn on Advanced Inventory, you will open up QuickBooks Enterprise and navigate to Preferences, under the Edit menu.

Then, navigate to Items and Inventory. Turn on Inventory and purchase orders are active checklist item, and then it will illuminate the Advanced Inventory Settings button.

Click on this to set up your Advanced Inventory selections. Keep in mind some selections may not be possible if you enable others.

You can turn on Multiple Inventory sites, and will need to select your Default site. Some clients use this for actual warehouse locals, while still others will use this to track truck inventory, as sub areas in the warehouse (sort of like larger bins), or for many other reasons. At the end of the day, this is just another tool to segment your inventory. Below, I just named my default site the ever-innovative “Default.” Since there are transactions in this sample file, QuickBooks will assign any existing transactions to the default site. If you have multiple sites and turned this feature on later, you will want to go back and reclass any other transactions once you are finished.

You have a similar situation with Bins.

You can then turn on Serial OR Lot numbers. Since the program only allows one of these options, if you need both you will want to discuss how you will capture the extra information. You can use custom fields or items as one alternative to serial numbers. Your item list has a 1M list item limit.

You can turn on FIFO (my preferred method of costing in many scenarios) on the next tab. By default, QuickBooks Enterprise uses Average Cost.

Barcodes are turned on in the next screen.

You can also use the Barcode generator wizard here.

QuickBooks makes barcoding easy. If you don’t have them on, and don’t have custom codes, you can convert many of your item fields straight to barcode format.

Under Site Operations you can then turn on the Sales and Pick Order Fulfillment worksheet. I love these options when using the Android Warehouse app, or when using your inventory scanner. Check the bottom of the post for other barcoding articles to read. Don’t forget to set up your warehouse users, or these sheets won’t be too helpful!

AND NEW TO 2020 – LANDED COST.

You want to use an Other Current Asset account for these, since the account will be reduced and moved to COGS as items are sold. We will go through this feature in greater detail in one of our upcoming posts.

Since we are focusing on Advanced Inventory set up, I’m leaving this blank for now, but QuickBooks is definitely telling me not to!

Once you have set up your Advanced Inventory Settings, you can then continue building out your Inventory lists and other tables, assigning items to locations, bins, serial numbers or the like, and adding a level of accounting to your inventory that is not available in any other version of QuickBooks.

Do you need help or do you want to talk about your Advanced Inventory with our team? Set up your meeting here.

Some other helpful barcoding posts: