What QuickBooks Online inventory locations mean on count day

QuickBooks Online does not track inventory by location within a warehouse. It keeps one quantity on hand per item, and the inventory adjustment form takes one number per item. So when you count by location, the books cannot tell you which location a unit was in.

Three meanings of location: QuickBooks Online, Desktop Enterprise and your warehouse

The first is location tracking in QuickBooks Online. Intuit's location tracking article says "Location tracking is used to categorize data from different locations, offices, regions, outlets, or departments of the same company."

The article says you can see all the payments for one location and deposit them as a group. Location tracking is available on Plus and Advanced.

Categorizing data by company location does not give an item a quantity for each location. Intuit's usage-limits article states 40 combined classes and locations on Plus and unlimited classes and locations on Advanced.

The second is inventory sites. Site and bin tracking are QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise features, not QuickBooks Online ones.

Intuit's Enterprise setup article says sites are warehouses, trucks, piles, staging areas, or any location where you track inventory. Intuit's multiple inventory sites article describes site-level reports and locations within a site for QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise.

The third meaning is your own. On count day, a location is the smallest place you record a quantity against, such as a pallet position or a rack opening. That is the meaning the rest of this page uses.

One item per warehouse and the cost on count day

For QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise, the Enterprise setup article describes creating a separate item for each site, with a naming scheme. Its example is three warehouses with three items for the same product.

The article also covers converting back to one item per product. It has you calculate the quantity at each site and the total across sites. It then has you clean the item list to one item per product, adjust the redundant items to zero and increase the quantity of the item you keep.

The article warns that the steps are complicated. It says to get help from a ProAdvisor or an accountant. It notes that different average costs across the duplicate items leave a net effect on the adjustment account.

If your books hold one item per warehouse, one product on your count sheet matches several items in your books. The sum by item then becomes a mapping job. Someone has to total the sheets for each warehouse's item on its own, so each one can be compared with its own book quantity.

A unit found in the wrong warehouse is a discrepancy on two items at once, because one item is short and another is over. If you work this way, keep the mapping list with the count sheets. Write down which items in your books make up each physical product before count day, not during it.

Planning a count by location

Write down every location that can hold stock on count day. Include receiving, returns, trucks and staging areas. Give each one a sheet, and mark the sheet empty when the location holds nothing.

Group the locations into zones, usually an aisle, so one counter can finish a zone before moving on. Name each zone the way the signs on the floor name it. A counter should never have to guess which sheet belongs to which place.

Expect one item to turn up in several locations. Record each location's quantity on its own count sheet. Add the quantities up by item only after every sheet is in.

Here is how that looks with real numbers. Say item 4410 sits in aisle 3, in receiving and on a truck. Counters write 40, 12 and 8 on three different sheets, so the counted total for that item is 60.

If your books say 64, you have one discrepancy of four units on one item. The three sheets tell you which places to recount first. That is the reason to keep the quantity for each location on its own sheet.

If you only want to count some locations on a rolling schedule, that is cycle counting, and cycle counting vs a physical inventory count compares it with a full count. QuickBooks Online inventory limitations for warehouses walks through reconciling the totals by hand. The quantity on hand page explains the book number you compare against.

Where Count keeps the location

Every counted quantity in Count is recorded against a location, and a count plan is made of the locations that get counted. An item's counted total is the sum across the plan's locations. Count connects to QuickBooks Online and imports items with their QuickBooks quantity on hand, and the adjustment compares each counted total with that QuickBooks quantity.

If you keep one item per warehouse, each QuickBooks item a sync brings in carries its own link to a Count item. A sync matches a QuickBooks item to the Count item with the same item number, which is the QuickBooks name cut to 50 characters.

For an item with a variance, the variance report lists the location or locations where it was counted next to the snapshot quantity, counted quantity and quantity variance. The same report gives each item's item number, description and percent variance, and who last counted it. If your accountant asks who counted and when, the count history by location report shows the count plan, the date counted and who counted for each count, with the item's snapshot, counted and variance quantities.

Both reports can be exported to Excel and PDF.

Items that QuickBooks shows in stock and nobody counted are listed as possible missing items. If you find one of them in a location you left off the plan, a manager can add locations to a complete plan, which reopens it.

Nothing posts while the count is running, and nothing posts until a manager approves the discrepancy; only approved lines post; nothing nobody counted is zeroed automatically; posting from a partial count is not available. Each send creates one Inventory Quantity Adjustment in QuickBooks. Each line carries the item's counted total as its new quantity, and only items linked to a QuickBooks Online item get a line.

Count supports unlimited warehouses on paid plans. Count is a physical-count workflow, not a warehouse management system or an ERP.