QuickBooks is the most widely used accounting platform among small businesses. And if you’re already using QuickBooks, you might be wondering or skeptical about whether QuickBooks also offers inventory management services. After all, accounting and inventory are so inextricably linked that having a single product to manage both the services is a no-brainer.
QuickBooks Desktop is supplied with an Inventory feature to keep a check on stock items of the business. In addition to this, you can track the inventory stock and value after every purchase and sale of the different types of items. This feature specially develops to meet the requirements of the businesses to keep a proper check of items in the warehouse. In case of Inventory, too many items would only result in payment of higher charges for the company and if the stock is low, the customer might look somewhere else to make the purchase of that items. When you are well versed with available inventory features in QuickBooks desktop you can keep your inventory records up to date. On top of that, you can set reminders for reordering the Inventory items when any item falls below a certain point.
Let’s take a look on some more information about Inventory Management in QuickBooks Desktop.
1. QuickBooks inventory management is best for businesses which maintains a budget
Accounting and inventory management both are equally important when it comes to running your business. But the true fact is that the accounting and inventory software can be expensive.
The nice thing about QuickBooks? It includes both. QuickBooks users can enjoy an accounting system that works for their business and rudimentary inventory control without paying higher amount extra in each month.
QuickBooks’ inventory management features are supplementary features to the platform’s accounting function that is why inventory management features are not available on all plans. This does not mean that it is not well covered like accounting features. The Plans like Plus and Advanced plans from QuickBooks Online make some inventory features available like track inventory in addition to tracking income, expenses, cash flow, and invoices. The same features may be a supplemental feature, but it works very well within the whole QuickBooks platform and you can able to take advantage of the same.
So, QuickBooks’ inventory tracking functionality works well for small businesses with less than a hundred sales orders per month as well as in fulfilling more complex needs of midsize businesses. In fact, QuickBooks Online combined the Accounting and Inventory Management features in their plans and it allow you to keep your business one step ahead at all times.
2. QuickBooks inventory pros and cons
Although QuickBooks isn’t specifically designed for inventory management, it does include the basic features you need to run your business in that particular service. But, it is not the best and it also has some flaws.
In case of QuickBooks, it requires to purchase add-ons to unlock ecommerce selling and other features that many other brands have upfront and easily available for them. In order to sell online, you need to use QuickBooks Commerce within the QuickBooks Platform, which can cost your business extra. Although the regular inventory management side of QuickBooks does integrate sales data and inventory lists with many popular ecommerce apps but you won’t be able to branch your business out further.
And while we’re on the subject? Multichannel tracking—which allows you to follow your inventory as it’s sold across multiple sales channels including Instagram, ecommerce—is not available on QuickBooks Online. Instead of that you will need to invest your money in QuickBooks Commerce which is one of the part of QuickBooks Platform. This takes down the number of features immediately available to the users, and that results in a Cost increase.
Finally, there’s nothing surprising about the way QuickBooks provides essential features only on its desktop app. There are many features like barcoding, unlimited customer support and over 200+ report templates which are only available there. You want to be sure about that if you’re getting the best software for running your business—one that will work with multiple users and across all your warehouses and locations. We can’t able to give you guarantee about that QuickBooks will do that effectively without incurring extra costs.
We need to take a note about that QuickBooks treats its inventory management as a supplementary feature rather than a standalone product. And honestly? We can see why.
QuickBooks offers very limited inventory management features on pretty much every plan. Sure, you can track inventory levels, but then you don’t get any type of manufacturing features like bill of material generation on that particular plan. Even features that other inventory platforms consider basic in case of inventory management like managing multiple warehouses isn’t available unless you have a QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise plan.
And while we’re on the subject? There’s nothing surprising about the way QuickBooks provides essential features only on its desktop app. You can’t able to enjoy real-time data about your business without cloud-based inventory management software. You also can’t have the feature of multiple users updating your records simultaneously like the same feature is needed if you’re managing multiple warehouses.
Most importantly, we need to take a note about that QuickBooks’ inventory management system tends to produce more negative inventory than other service providers. Mostly, Negative inventory occurs when your inventory tracking system reflects a negative number of inventory items which are in your possession—usually due to some reasons like reporting order fulfillment too soon. Apparently, this is such a common problem faced by the users of QuickBooks products, the brand has taken a note of that problem and released a whole help article about it. QuickBooks even acknowledges the fact that the same issues may affect everything from your profit and loss statements to your cost of goods sold.
3. Key features of QuickBooks inventory management
i. Basic Features- The features related to the managing inventory in QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks desktop is relatively simple as compared to the other software’s. In fact, the QuickBooks platform doesn’t offer much more than basic features like tracking of inventory levels and shipments:
• Track products
• Track cost of goods
• Receive low inventory notifications
• Create purchase orders
• Manage vendors
• Review best-selling items
ii. Advanced inventory features- Most of QuickBooks’ plans include only limited inventory management features but the Enterprise plan on QuickBooks Desktop offers enhanced capabilities as compared to the other plans:
• Manage multiple warehouses
• Make Pair of your QuickBooks account with a barcode scanner
• Print labels
• Track items by bin number
• Manage sales order fulfillment
However, the mentioned features are only available to QuickBooks Desktop users with an Enterprise plan. They come with a significant drawback because they’re available only to Enterprise plan subscribers. That significant drawback is you can’t access your inventory tracking solution from the cloud.
There are some advantageous advanced features, and QuickBooks’ accounting integrations and features do put the software a step above other inventory management systems.
4. QuickBooks plans and key features
Most of the people don’t know that there are two different versions of QuickBooks: First one is the cloud-based online version i.e. QuickBooks Online and second one is the desktop version i.e. QuickBooks Desktop. Most QuickBooks Desktop Plans are available on the basis of yearly fees. There are total 3 plans in case of QuickBooks Desktop Plans.
i. QuickBooks Pro Plus- The key features of this plan are Bills and Accounts Payable Management, Time Tracking and Inventory Tracking.
ii. QuickBooks Premier Plus- The key features of this plan are Forecasting, Profitability tracking and Progressive client billing.
iii. QuickBooks Enterprise- The key features of this particular plan are Warehouse management, Mobile inventory barcode scanning and Serial and lot tracking.
5. Conclusion
QuickBooks’ inventory management works very well for the small businesses, but does have a lot of features after making the certain payment—like requiring you to sign up for the next plan or make purchase of add-on service. This isn’t a great part of the software, but for basic organization and combining it with QuickBooks accounting, the inventory management works well with tracking invoices, automating quantity adjustments, and sending out goods. Is it perfect? No, but it could be the thing for the enhancement of your business.
