Thursday, May 06, 2010

Taking Stock of Your Accounts

Most accounting systems can handle general business needs without too much fuss. As long as your business sells straightforward products using a simple pricing model, then it's probably OK to stick with a run of the mill accounting system.

But what if your products have:
  • multiple units of measure
  • serial and lot tracking with expiry dates
  • different costs at each location
  • more than one stock keeping bin location in each warehouse
  • barcodes for each packaging unit
  • the need to track costs by FIFO, Weighted Average Cost and Standard Costs
  • more than one dimension such as Colour, Size, Season, Width and Depth and the pricing varies for each of these attributes
  • Volume Pricing or Discounts by date range for both Sales and Purchases
  • Complex cost calculations that include foreign and local freight charges, agent handling fees, duty, warehousing fees, insurance all allocated on the basis of weight, value or cubic volume
If you're using a run of the mill accounting system and your business has complex stock requirements, you're probably using spreadsheets and word processing and many error prone manual procedures just to get your invoices out the door.

More information: Axsapt