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

Who said: "There's no accounting for style?"

When it comes to Accounting for the Fashion Industry, there are very few business systems that really nail the way Business Owners and Managers deal with the unique aspects of their stock in trade.

Many systems are "bolt-on" after-market modules that merely add Colour and Size attributes to each existing inventory items. This method is only useful to retailers that sell single quantities of each garment or shoe.

However, when it comes to wholesalers that sell many quantities of each Style in various combinations of colour and size, only a Matrix type Accounting System like, Axsapt Matrix or Noble Matrix can handle rapid data entry and logical invoices and reports.

In the above image, each Style item is represented in a Matrix or Grid with the Colours along the left hand side and the Sizes along the top. With Axsapt Matrix there are up to 30 sizes and an unlimited number of colours able to be assigned to each product.

When selecting an Accounting System for the Fashion Industry, make sure that all essential sales and stock reports are also represented in the easy to read Style/Colour/Size Matrix. And if you are dealing with Electronic Data Interchange ("EDI") or Retailers that will sell your products through their Point of Sale Systems, ensure your Matrix accounting system allows you to assign a unique barcode to each combination of colour and size.

More information: Axsapt