Reports and accounting

> Premier has an name limit of 14,500, for some this does not impact them at all, but down the road you never know.

Absolutely correct. LIst size is a consideration for any business which has significant number of Items. But many non-retail business types never use more than a couple hundred Items.

> I played with this same thing back in 08...

I did too, years ago, but back then never stumbled upon a setup which would work.

> in your screen shot you have "house" and a check for depreciation...since a depreciation entry is paper, not real, where does the 6K come from?

House is a Customer name used on in-house transactions to keep them out of "real" customer's accounts. Depreciation is entered as a zero-dollar check with a positive total posted to Depreciation Expense and negative amounts to individual assets' Depr Expense subitems. The 6K amount comes from a free depreciation spreadsheet at:  https://bit.ly/2EZFbls. The spreadsheet calculates depreciation for each asset and prepares individual-asset depreciation transactions, which are then imported into QuickBooks as a single transaction.

> to get the negative value for the depreciation item...

...you probably had not considered using a zero-dollar check.

> Inventory asset on the balance sheet will be correct, but inventory valuation summary will include both the fixed asset item and the depreciation item - big difference in total valuation....

Correct. The book warns readers to only use specific reports for getting fixed asset information, and Inventory Valuation is not one of them. Items devoted to fixed assets will of course appear in that report but the information about them there cannot be used.

Anyone who uses the valuation total at the bottom of that report (not sure many people do?...most are interested in specific Items or inventory categories, not the report total) will have to adjust it by subtracting the Fx Item's valuation amount. Fx is the parent Item for all fixed asset Items.

> and then there is the item list...Type ahead will probably find the FA item before it finds the discount or other item.

Inventory Part Items devoted to fixed assets all have Fx as their top-level parent Item, which helps with type ahead (and is also essential for easy fixed asset reporting). If you have an Inventory Part Item (earlier in the Item list) named Fx:Widget, and a Non-inventory Part Item (later in the Item list) named Widget, typing "Wid" will find the Non-inventory Part Item. Type ahead doesn't seem to be a problem.

Type ahead can nearly always be improved by how you structure the entire Item list. When the list is very large, making certain Item categories subitems of a short-named parent Item makes Type ahead more work better/more specifically. I just worked with a business that had dozens of Non-Inventory Part Items for different postage types and weights (First Class<1oz, Media Mail-1 lb., Media Mail-2lb., FlatRateBox-Small, FlatRateBox-Medium, etc.). Making all of these subitems of a parent Item named Po (for Postage) made both Type ahead and selection by mouse easier. They type "Po:" and then can select the desired postage Item from the short list of Items QuickBooks presents.

> ...all those inventory items for fixed assets show up in the middle of the item list, making it longer than hell, and harder to select an different type of item.

Longer, yes. But is that any different from the situation in a business which has 10,000 Items? Many non-retail businesses only use a few hundred Items to begin with...but once you've reached that number you really have to be using Type ahead anyway (along with structuring of the Item list like I mentioned above) to make locating Items easier.

A business with 100 fixed assets would be adding 300 to 400 Items to the Item list...not a significant burden. And businesses with a very large number of fixed assets should probably be using the Accountant edition and Fixed Asset Manager anyway, right? Many, many businesses never have more than a couple hundred fixed assets to manage, and an Inventory Part Item approach is appropriate for them.

> Back then I did not think about creating a second a/p account...

Not applicable. No additional A/P account is needed.

> As it stands all my FA are under the parent account, a balance sheet allows me to collapse the sub accounts showing just the sum total as fixed assets.  I would much rather have a long account list that I rarely use as opposed to a long item list I use all the time.

Understood...personal choice. But Items have other advantages. One is the ability to let a single Item represent a group of like fixed assets--a fleet of vehicles purchased at the same time, for instance. As some vehicles are removed from the group (sold/wrecked/salvaged, etc.) the Item always has an inventory count of the number of vehicles remaining in the group.

> Out of curiosity, are you the author of the book?

Yes. I only mentioned it here because it was specifically appropriate to the original poster's question.