Special QuickBooks 2021 Tips for Retailers

Instead of going through the process of recording and printing a sales receipt from QuickBooks every time someone buys something, most retailers record their sales in a much simpler way. Retailers record the day’s sales by using one, two, or three sales receipt transactions. Retailers don’t record each individual sales receipt transaction.

Say that some coffee-mug retailer sold 200 red coffee mugs for the day for $3 each. In that case, at the end of the day, the retailer needs to record total sales of $600 and then the sales tax. With these example numbers, the daily sales would be recorded by using a sales receipt transaction in the Sales Receipts window.

Pretty straightforward, right? And that’s not too much work, all things considered. Here are a handful of other tips for recording retail sales:

• You probably want to record a sales receipt transaction for each deposit you make. In this manner, you can indicate that a particular sales receipt transaction (really, a batch of sales) is deposited at one time into your bank account — which makes reconciling your bank account relatively easy.
• You probably want to separate cash sales from credit card sales because credit card sales are often handled differently. Your credit card processing company, for example, might hold on to credit card sales for a few days, or it might deduct a fee before depositing the money into your bank account. You want to record a separate sales receipt transaction for each deposit that you make (or some other company makes) into the bank account — again, to make reconciling the bank account easier.

If you don’t use the Item list to monitor your inventory (because you have way too many items to store in the QuickBooks Item list), use items that are designated as noninventory parts. You might use noninventory part items — such as daily cash sales, daily AmEx sales, and daily Visa/MC sales — if you make three deposits every day for cash and check sales, for American Express sales, and for Visa and MasterCard sales. If you don’t track inventory in your items file, your CPA handles the inventory and cost-of-goods-sold (COGS) calculations on your tax return. He or she probably also records a journal entry transaction to get your account balances correct as of the end of your fiscal year. Note that QuickBooks may put a couple of noninventory part items on your Item list for just this purpose if you tell it that you’re a retailer (Total Sales – Non-Taxable and Total Sales – Taxable).

• You may want to look at the QuickBooks Point of Sale system. The QuickBooks Point of Sale system makes it easy to record cash-register sales quickly. QuickBooks Point of Sale comes with scanners, cash drawers, and receipt printers, and it syncs with QuickBooks Desktop. When you ring up a sale with the QuickBooks Point of Sale system, the software automatically records your sales and the effect on inventory and COGS.
• You may not want to use inventory items to track your inventory if you’re a retailer. You may instead want to use noninventory part items or generic noninventory part items. When you do, QuickBooks won’t track the quantity of items that sell — only the dollar amounts of your sales.