MoneyWorks Manual
Items, Products and Inventory
Often in business you purchase or sell the same product items or services over and over again. The MoneyWorks product/inventory system can help this.
An item is anything that you buy or sell on a regular basis. It may be something intangible, such as consulting services, or an actual physical product, such as a magazine. There are several different ways that items can be used, and an organisation may use some, all or none of these.
Consumables These are items that you purchase, but they are intended for (more or less) immediate consumption. This includes items such as electricity, photocopy paper, office supplies etc. When you purchase consumables, they are normally treated as an expense.
Saleables These are things which you sell. Sometimes you might sell an item (such as courier tickets), or it might be a service that you provide (consulting). In either case, these are normally treated as income items.
Counted Items These are items for which you just want to maintain a running count, so when you purchase three the count increases by three, and when you sell one it decreases by one. This is a very simple form of inventory, but without the inventory accounting.
Inventory Items These are items that you make or purchase and hold in inventory. Not only does MoneyWorks maintain a count of the items you have in stock (as for counted items), but it also maintains the value of these items. Crucially the fundamental accounting for inventoried items is different: when these items are in stock they are normally treated as assets, and only when sold will they be expensed.
If you keep inventoried items in several locations (for example, multiple branches or warehouses, or even as consignment stock), then you should consider using Location tracking.
Some inventory items, such as computers or phones, might also have serial numbers that you want to track, and others, like drugs (hopefully the good kind) or carpet, might have batch numbers and even expiry dates.
For more information see Locations, Serial Numbers and Batches.
In MoneyWorks you can create these kinds of products and then use them in your normal accounting transactions. You can also use the Enquiries and Analysis features of MoneyWorks to determine what happened to these items (for example, which customers purchased which items).