Item Cost Change Impacted Historical Transactions

Hi kchris10,

Welcome to Community!  It's important to keep your products and services up to date to save valuable time when creating forms.  QuickBooks Online provides the flexibility needed when items change.  I'd be happy to provide more information so you're on the right track with your work!

To locate changes that were made to the your inventory, you can go to Settings ⚙ > Audit log.  If you need to make changes to the COGS, you can edit the inventory items by following this helpful guide.  When editing the items you'll see the option to update price in recurring templates.  However, changing the price of an item won't affect existing transactions.  In addition, once you've reviewed the information in the audit log, you can make any necessary changes to user roles and access rights as you see necessary.

If you require additional assistance with this situation, please don't hesitate to contact us.  It would be our pleasure to work with you directly and ensure you're back to business as soon as possible.

Schedule a Callback or start a Chat: click (?) Help in the upper right in QuickBooks Online > enter "Contact support" > hit Contact Us > provide a brief summary of your situation > hit Let's Talk > choose Get a callback or Start a Chat.
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Feel free to reach back out if you have other questions.  We'd be glad to assist!

TL;DR: Does anyone else have an actual answer?

Hello Trish T,

It's kind of you to take the time to reply, but your answer does not in any way respond to my questions.  

1. I'm not using Quickbooks Online, as I clearly identified in my post when choosing my Product, and even mentioned in the body of the text as QBD.  There is no "Settings > Audit Log" in QB DESKTOP.

2. You state, "changing the price of an item won't affect existing transactions", and yet, this is exactly what happened.  Sometime in the last 3 weeks, the Cost of an Item was changed, and this afftected existing transactions, including in years in which Financials were closed.

I still need to know how this happened, and more importantly, how to prevent it from happening again.

Karen

Hi kchris10,

Thanks for getting back to me here.  My apologies for providing information for QuickBooks Online.  In QuickBooks Desktop you can run the Audit Trail report and apply filters to locate specific information.  Simply select Reports on the top menu and choose Account & Taxes from the list followed by Audit Trail.  If you need to review user roles and permissions, click here.  In addition, when a change is made to the price of an item, it won't affect existing transactions as noted in this guide for adding, editing and deleting items in QuickBooks Desktop.

For additional assistance and recommendations on how to prevent unauthorized changes, please feel free to contact us so we can work with you directly and look further into this from our end.

All the best!

TL;DR: Again, does anyone have a helpful answer?

Hello Trish T,

Once again, you've given me no useful information, and I'm wondering if you're actually reading what I've written. 

You've suggested running the Audit Trail report.  The Audit Trail report shows changes to *Transactions* only.  It does not show changes to Items.  For example, if I Edit an Item, there is no report I can run that shows I did that.  (If I'm wrong about this, please tell me what parameters to use to create an Item Edits Audit Trail report.)

Second, again you've stated something that's completely contradictory to our experience.  Your statement "when a change is made to the price of an item, it won't affect existing transactions" is false.  A change was made to the COST of an item (not the price, as you seem to think) and it DID affect existing transactions, including transactions in closed years (which has caused a big mess).  I'm asking you - or anyone - to explain that phenomenon and how I can prevent it happening again. 

Just for clarity - when the Cost of the Item changed, 2 Invoices from 2018 were impacted (among many others).  Those 2 Invoices now show $$ in COGS and Inventory accounts when previously there was $0.  However, reviewing the Transaction History report for the 2 Invoices shows NO CHANGES in the Accounting.  It's as though the COGS and Inventory $$ were always there, which we can prove is not the case.  So the Transaction History report and/or Audit Trail report are useless in this case.

Hoping for help,

Karen

Thanks for coming back to this thread and sharing more insights about how this item change affected historical entries in QuickBooks, Karen.

I'm joining the thread to share some more insights about this topic.

Regarding the Audit Trail report, this can only display the modifications made to your transactions affecting your books during a specified accounting period. It also includes who made those changes.

The audit report in QuickBooks Desktop will not include any changes made to items. For now, there isn't any report available you can pull up item history after making changes.

Also, I've tried replicating the same scenario by creating bills and checks for a closed fiscal year and the current period. After that, I updated the cost of the items used, but it didn't affect those entries. What happened to your entries is an unexpected behavior in the program.

For this, we highly recommend contacting our technical support to help you correct your entries. They can check your company file and help explain further why this happened.

Here's how to contact us:

1. Open QuickBooks and click the Help menu.
2. Select QuickBooks Desktop Help.
3. On the pop-up screen select Contact us.
   
4. Click the Search for Something else button then type your concern in the Ask us anything box.
5. Hit Search then scroll down to get your contact options.

Additionally, if there is a backup copy of the company file prior to the changes, you can restore it. Please note that we only advise this if you have not create new transactions after changing the cost.

Please come back here after contacting our support. I want to ensure you're taken care of. I'm also here if you have other concerns about the program.