How/where to enter year end/beginning inventory in QB online Essentials

Thank you for checking in with us, Wisdom Ways.

Let me provide you with some insights about tracking inventory in QuickBooks Online Essentials.

QuickBooks Online Essentials is best for small businesses that not only need to track income and expenses and manage accounts receivable, but that also need to track the money owed to suppliers (accounts payable).

Tracking inventory is not included with Quickbooks Online Essentials, however, it is offered in Quickbooks Online Plus.  QBO Plus makes tracking the purchase and sale of the product a piece of cake.

You may find this article helpful: How to set up Inventory tracking.

If you need additional help, feel free to reach out to our QuickBooks Online Support. Our contact details can be found here along with our opening hours.

1. Go to: https://help.quickbooks.intuit.com/en_US/contact.
2. Choose your QuickBooks Product.
3. Select your QuickBooks version.
4. On the Contact Us page, click a topic.
5. Click on the Get Phone Number button to see the support number.

Let me know if any questions may arise while working in QuickBooks Online.

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@Wisdom Ways wrote:

We don't use QB to track our inventory/sales, we use a completely different software system for that. We still need a place to enter inventory totals in QB though as it affects bookkeeping reports. 

 

When we pay for inventory/products that we will be selling, that expense goes under COGS when reconciling our bank account in QB. However, I don't see anywhere to actually LOG or enter in our inventory at the beginning/end of the year? 

 

So my question is, how/where do I enter in year end/beginning inventory

 

 

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create a Journal Entry dated 12/31: debit Inventory asset, credit COGS.  Next year post the change.

Awesome! So, just to be sure that I understand you correctly, (I really have no accounting/bookkeeping knowledge of the whole credit/debit journal entry thing) I'm going to give an generic example and see if I've got it right.

Let's say at the end of 12/31/18 that we have $1,000 in inventory value (i.e. what we PAID for our existing product inventory that we haven't sold yet). I would make a journal entry of 1k as a debit for inventory asset and in the SAME journal entry, in the credit field under COGS, I'd also put 1k? Honestly, I really have no idea what purpose this serves, but then that's pretty much the name of the game for me with bookkeeping. :-/

If I'm correct about my example above, I have one more question: If I'm adding lost/stolen/expired inventory into QB, (let's pretend someone stole $500 of product in 2018), how would I do that journal entry?

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