Category: Manufacturing

Understanding QuickBooks Reorder and Build Points

| August 25, 2008 | 14 Comments

It’s never a good idea to run out of important inventory items that you resell or use in manufacturing. In simple inventory control systems we often set a minimum stocking level that is used to generate a warning when an item falls below a particular on-hand balance, so that you can order (or build) more […]

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Outsourced or Sub-Contract Work in QuickBooks

| August 6, 2008 | 16 Comments

Many manufacturing (and other) businesses send materials out to another firm to perform some intermediary processing of the item. This can be plating of a component part, populating a PC board with circuit components, and many other tasks. I’ll give you some ideas of how you might handle this in QuickBooks.

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Why Won’t QuickBooks Let Me Build This Assembly?

| July 31, 2008 | 9 Comments

Computer programs can be frustrating when they don’t let you do what you want. They are supposed to be a tool that helps you run your business! One complaint that I hear often from QuickBooks manufacturing users is that the program won’t let them build an assembly when they can see that they have the […]

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Manufacturing WIP in QuickBooks

| July 1, 2008 | 19 Comments

Tracking Work in Progress (WIP) in a manufacturing business can be complicated, depending on the characteristics of your manufacturing process. For an extremely oversimplified definition we can say that WIP is where you are taking items out of your raw material (component) inventory, but haven’t yet put it back into your finished goods inventory. I’m […]

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QuickBooks Groups for Custom Manufacturers

| June 25, 2008 | 21 Comments

Most QuickBooks users think of Group and Inventory Assembly items as an “either-or” decision – use one or the other. There are times, however, when we can mix the two items to solve problems in QuickBooks. This is particularly useful for custom manufacturers – businesses that produce custom variations of their finished product for each […]

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Groups vs Assemblies in QuickBooks

| June 20, 2008 | 87 Comments

QuickBooks provides two item “types” that can have a list of component items – an Inventory Assembly and a Group. How do they differ, and when is it best to use one instead of the other? Today I’ll list the features of each and how you can use them.

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Tracking QuickBooks BOM Revisions

| May 28, 2008 | 5 Comments

In most manufacturing businesses you will find that the structure of the Bill of Materials for items will change over time. Today I’ll discuss how QuickBooks deals with these changes.

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QuickBooks Manufacturing Bill of Materials

| May 15, 2008 | 18 Comments

In my post on QuickBooks manufacturing basics I discussed the essential nuts and bolts (sorry for the pun) of building assemblies in QuickBooks. Today I’ll talk about structuring your bills of material (BOM’s). A BOM is a simple thing, right? You want to build something, you just enter in the list of all the parts […]

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Importing QuickBooks Inventory with Excel

| April 29, 2008 | 236 Comments

There are a number of reasons why you may want to use Excel to import items to your item list in QuickBooks: Converting a list from another program, making copies of existing items, bulk addition of a new product line, and more. Today I’m going to give you an overview of how to use Excel […]

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QuickBooks Manufacturing Tutorial

| April 22, 2008 | 46 Comments

QuickBooks has a “Manufacturing & Wholesale” edition, but there is a definite lack of documentation on how to actually use QuickBooks in a manufacturing business. This posting is the first in a series that will give you some guidelines on how to best use QuickBooks in a manufacturing environment. I’ll start off with some basics, […]

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