Hello QB community,
I'm in need of a little bit of help in setting up our inventory and transferring from our current software to QuickBooks. I've gone ahead with one approach, but I want to check with the community to see if I've gone about it correctly. I mostly want to see your opinion and if this solution is viable.
Background:
We are a distributor of licensed sports products and therefore sell just about everything sports related. We currently have over 12,000 items in our database and this list is ever changing as we get new stuff or phase out older items. We would like to switch to QuickBooks to help speed up and simplify tasks that take forever in our current inventory management software. We sell just about every single team for NFL, NHL, NBA, and a lot of NCAA teams all of which have several very different products for each team. Each item has a team that it belongs to, a product name, an SRP (suggested retail price), and a unique UPC code. We are currently trying to switch to QuickBooks but are struggling to figure out what the best long-term solution is for setting up our inventory items.
Inventory Question:
Initially, I had set up all our items to just use the UPC as the item name with the custom fields being used to supply the Team, League, and SRP, but then ran into the issue of how to keep the team names consistent. I then was told in another forum post to set up an item like NFL and then create a sub-item for the different teams (NFL:CHICAGO BEARS) and then the actual item as a sub-item of those items. So, in the end, a completed item would look like this (NFL:CHICAGO BEARS:UPC_CODE). I kind of like this approach because it makes sure that all items have a uniform naming structure and helps prevent employees from spelling the team name wrong.
But this is where the issue of the custom fields comes into play because we still need to add the custom field with the team name to print it on invoices, pick tickets, POs, etc. and this is where employees can mess up and spell the team name wrong or simply put “Bears” instead of “Chicago Bears.” Another reason that we need the custom field is that if we view the inventory list in the hierarchical view then we only see UPC codes with the description unless we add in a custom column with our custom field for the League and Team Name.
I just want to make sure that we set up our inventory correct the first time and do not have to come back in a year and completely redo it because we figured out it wasn’t going to work. I've also gone ahead and attached an image of what the current inventory setup look like in QuickBooks (Current Set-Up.png). If anyone has any recommendations or thinks I should do something differently, please let me know.
Thanks,
Jared
