It would depend on how you get the bills and how you want things to show up on the billing side. Using my clearing account example, the “3rd party freight company” could still be the same vendor that you purchase the items from. So you could run this through a clearing account, but just enter two bills for the same vendor (one for the items, one for the freight).

POS is a very different product, written (originally) by different people, and it does things very differently.

There is no reason why Intuit can’t deal with this better other than they haven’t taken the time, they think other things are more important, and (in my opinion) they tend to not do things that don’t improve the revenue that they might generate.

Best I can say is to leave them comments in the “feedback” portion of the Help Menu – if enough people complain, they may pay attention. I know of a number of improvements that have been based on that kind of feedback.

How you do this is up to you aren your accounting advisor. I don’t know what the official answer is, from a tax standpoint (as I understand it, the IRS wants the landed cost, but I don’t know if they specify how you do that).

From a practical standpoint, not as a CPA or tax advisor, I would think that you could just divide the amount up equally if that saves you a lot of time. The more detailed you are with proportionally dividing it the more accurate your valuations are, but that could take a lot of work. It depends on how accurate you want to be and how much time you can afford. But, check with your accounting advisor…

At the end you suggest using a QuickReport to check the net balance of the clearing account is zero. That worked great. But do you have a suggestion for how I can see what I’m spending on incoming freight in my situation? It think it would be a valuable number to know.

Thanks

What really surprises me, after reading your blog and your comments (and Rustler’s comments) on the Intuit community, is that neither of you mentioned that Intuit DOES know how to do this – it’s part of QuickBooks POS. Check out the following help file:

http://support.quickbooks.intuit.com/support/pages/inproducthelp/POS/POSv6_Basic/qbpos_receiving/voucher_spreadcosts.htm

Of course, POS doesn’t do half of the other things I need done (like assemblies, etc) AND it costs $1500!!!

I can’t really describe how angry I am right now after realizing that the most used small business accounting software is not at all what it’s cracked up to be and doesn’t provide some of the most basic functions one would expect from an accounting package.