Managing Products and Services in QuickBooks Online

Customers may be the lifeblood of your business, but they wouldn’t exist without the products and services you sell. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a mineral specimen dealer who does one-off sales, a reseller who sells items you make or buy wholesale in large lots, or a provider of services. You must always know what you have available to offer buyers.

QuickBooks Online can keep you in the know, and it can manage the forms and transactions you need to do business with your buying audience. If you were doing your accounting and customer management manually, you might be using index cards, large wall calendars and file folders stuffed with product lists and schedules. You’d spend a lot of time digging through item drawers and closets, counting your inventory by hand, and shuffling paper invoices, sales receipts and payment documentation.

Instead, what if all of this were automated, saving time, reducing errors, and increasing your chances of success? Here’s a quick look at some of the basics.

Are You Ready?

To be ready to sell, QuickBooks must be set up to handle any inventory you might have. Click the gear icon in the upper right corner and then click Account and settings under Your Company. Click Sales in the toolbar and scroll down to Products and services. Make sure the first, fourth, and fifth options are turned on, as pictured below. (The other two are optional.) If they’re not, click the pencil icon in the upper right corner and change them. Be sure to click Save when you’re finished, then Done in the lower right corner.

Have you created your product and service records? You can do this on the fly as you’re entering transactions, but it’s much better to do it ahead of time. That way, too, you’re not as likely to skip the details, which will be important later on when you’re running reports, for example. We’ve gone over the steps before. Click New in the upper left corner, then Add product/service under Other. A vertical panel slides out from the right, and you simply select from options and enter data.

Warning: Be precise when you’re dealing with inventory information. If you haven’t gone through this process before, it might be worth scheduling a session to go over this important step.

Using Your Records in Transactions

Let’s go through the process of entering a sales receipt. Click New in the upper left corner, and then Sales receipt under Customers. Choose a Customer from the drop-down list and complete any other fields necessary in the upper section of the form. Select the Service Date in the first column by clicking the calendar, then select the Product/Service in the next column (or click + Add new). The Description should fill in automatically.

The QTY (quantity) defaults to 1. If you mouse over or click in that field, a small window will pop up containing numbers for Qty. on hand and Reorder point, as pictured above.

Tip: If you know that you have more in stock than what is showing, you can cancel out of the transaction, find the item record in the list on the Products & services page, and click Edit at the end of the row. You’ll be able to adjust the quantity or the starting value. Be careful with this. Please contact the office if you’re not confident about how to handle it.

Enter any additional items and/or services needed and save the transaction.

The Products and Services Page

QuickBooks Online offers numerous reports related to products and services and inventory tracking (you’ll find them under Reports | Sales and customers), but you can learn a lot from the Product and Service page (Sales | Products and Services). At the top of the screen (where you can’t miss them) are two colored circles containing the number of items that are Low Stock or Out of Stock.

 

Click on either of these, and the list below will change to display only these items. You can get a lot of information about your products and services on this page, including Sales Price and Cost, Qty On Hand, and Reorder Point. You can also create new records or import databases of records in CSV, Excel, and Google Sheet formats.

Need Assistance?

Your business depends on accurate, real-time information about your inventory, and QuickBooks Online can supply it. This element of the site, though, requires precision and regular upkeep. If you’re struggling with it, contact the office for help troubleshooting one-time problems or to take a more active role in your accounting.