Read this next: Module 4: Creating and/or Importing your Relationships
Here we’ll cover:
- QuickBooks Commerce's inventory categories
- What are Initial Costs and why are they important
- What are Moving Average Costs and why are they important
- Creating Products in QuickBooks Commerce
With the groundwork laid, you’re now ready to start unlocking your first commerce superpower - centralized inventory management & control.
The Inventory section is the central location where all of your product information will be stored. In this section, you can create new products and price lists, publish products to various sales channels and update existing product listings depending on your integration settings.
Properly setting up and understanding Initial Costs and Moving Average Costs will help to ensure that QuickBooks CommerceIntelligence reflects the right information with regards to your operating costs, what products to order when, and accurately reflect your Stock on Hand Value and Cost of Goods Sold (COGS).
At this time we’ll provide you with a quick overview of the types of inventory that QuickBooks Commerce allows you to manage. Depending on your assortment, your inventory setup process will vary.
To summarize:
- Purchased Product: a component or finished goods that you purchase from a supplier.
- Manufactured Product: a finished good that you assemble.
- Pack Size: a numbered grouping of the same product.
- Bundle: a kit or a bundle of different products.
- Batch Tracked Product: a finished good that requires batch/lot numbers to be tracked in addition to expiry dates.
From an assortment of products to commerce ecosystem, each business is unique. Please reflect on yours before selecting the appropriate setup flow listed below.
Within your product assortment, do you currently:
- Sell Purchased Products?
- Sell Manufactured Products?
- Sell Pack Sizes?
- Sell Bundles of one or more products?
- Sell Batch Tracked Products?
How do you sell your products:
- I only sell on one sales channel
- I sell on more than one sales channel
Creating Products in QuickBooks Commerce by Sales Channel Integration & Import (Recommended)
Please select the description that best fits your business:
1. Ecosystem: 1 sales channel, Assortment: Purchased Products only
2. Ecosystem: 1 sales channel, Assortment: Purchased Products and Bundles and/or Pack Sizes
Creating a Product Manually
To create a product manually in QuickBooks Commerce, you must first navigate to the Products section by clicking “Inventory” from the navigation menu, then “Products”.
Purchased Product Example
Click the “Create New” button located on the top right-hand side of your screen. Follow the steps in the popup window to create either a Purchased or Manufactured product.
Fill in the purchased product’s details.
When creating a product, important fields are:
- Manage stock level: this will indicate that you want QuickBooks Commerce to be the master of stock for this product otherwise the product will be listed with infinite stock availability
- Sellable: this will indicate whether or not this product can be listed and sold
- Initial Cost: the dollar value of acquiring one unit of your existing stock on hand
If a product has multiple variants (i.e. sold in multiple sizes, colors or flavors), you can create these variants now.
If this particular product is sold in different pack sizes, you can create these options for each variant now.
If your product has multiple variants and pack sizes, you’ll be taken to a Product Summary page after you click “Continue to Summary” where you can create and input:
- An SKU
- Initial Stock
- Initial Cost
- Buy Price
- Retail Price
- Wholesale Price
- Mark the product as sellable
- Indicate unit weight
Once you’ve input the correct information into these fields, click the “Create Product” button located at the bottom of the page.
To make any modifications to each product and variant, including adding images, editing descriptions, changing prices, locations, and more, click on the variant you want to modify.
Once clicked, you’ll be taken to is the main product Details tab, where you can input and edit your product’s information.
Once complete, click the Images tab to attach one or more images to each product.
Next, click on the Stock Locations tab.
Here you can:
- Input and make modifications to bin locations
- Set reorder points
- Set lead times
- Set safety stock levels
- Set stock cover values.
These attributes will help you and your staff locate your products and feed information into QuickBooks Commerce Intelligence for accurate reporting and forecasting.
Click on the Sales Channels tab.
This section will allow you to manually manage where each product and variant is published, listed, or linked in your integrated sales channels once they are installed.
Click on the Activity tab located on the far right-hand side.
Here you can review time-stamped activity associated with a particular product or variant. This can be done by stock location and you can filter by:
- Stock Movement
- Open Sales Orders
- Incoming Purchase Orders
- Production Orders Committed (Manufacturing)
Creating your Products by .csv Upload
To bulk upload your products into QuickBooks Commerce via .csv file, click on the “Bulk Manage” button located at the top right-hand side of your screen.
Select “Import New Products.”
A pop-up window will appear where you can choose to upload a prepared spreadsheet or a template.
As this is the first time uploading inventory into QuickBooks Commerce, click “I need a product spreadsheet template.”
If you sell any products that have multiple variants (i.e. a shirt that comes in multiple colors and sizes), select the button on the left.
If you only sell products that have a single variant, select the button on the right.
For this example, I’m going to select the button on the left to upload products that have multiple variants.
The next step is to select the product attributes, price lists, and sales channels you want to update with the product information that you’ll populate in this spreadsheet.
Once you select all of the attributes that you want to upload into QuickBooks Commerce, click “Build Product Template.”
Next click “Download Product Sheet,” open the spreadsheet, and input all of the required details by using Excel or Google Sheets.
In this example, I’ll upload the .csv into Google Sheets to edit.
Once you have made all of the appropriate edits, save the file as a .csv on your desktop.
Upload the .csv file via this same window that you used to download the template or upload it via the Inventory>Products section by clicking on “Bulk Manage.”
Click “Import New Products,” then click “I have a spreadsheet with product data ready to upload.”
Once you select “Upload,” you’ll be taken to a preview window where you can confirm the import of your data.
If there are any errors pertaining to suppliers, country codes (you must use 2-character notations) or the “Initial Cost field is blank,” an alert will appear stating the issues so that you can take action to correct them and attempt to re-upload the file.
If everything has been entered correctly, your product list will upload and you’ll be able to view the products and variants within QuickBooks Commerce's Inventory section.
