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You are here: Experts > Shopping > Credit/Debt Management > Quicken & Other Budget/Accounting Software > Quicken Unit Sales Reports
Expert: Linda Saltz, CPA, QBalance.com - 11/6/2009
Question
QUESTION: I use Quicken Home & Business for my online comic book business. I have about a dozen comics that I sell through 3 vendors. I would like to be able to track unit sales as well as sales in dollars. Is it possible to generate reports with unit sales in Quicken or Quickbooks?
ANSWER: Hi Jay,
QuickBooks includes a sales report, Sales by item summary which displays total Quantity and
total sales dollars by Item. You can filter this report to display just one customer, then
memorize the report for easy retrieval. You will need to run 3 reports, one per customer,
to get all the information you are looking for. You can also set up a Memorized Group, save the
3 reports to that group, and when it is time to display or print them, you can select all the
reports in that group at once, making fast work of getting the information you are looking for.
I do not use Quicken Home and Business and therefore, I cannot research the reports available.
I recommend running the sales reports that are available, clicking on the customize button in the top right corner and looking at the display tab. If the Columns section does not offer an
option to display Quantity, then you will not be able to retrieve the reports you need.
You can however, filter these reports under the same customize button by customer, by clicking on
the payee tab and selecting only one customer.
Hope this helps,
Linda Saltz, CPA
Advanced Certified QuickBooks Advisor
www.qbalance.com
We sell QuickBooks Checks at a discount!
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Thanks so much for your very helpful answer! I do have another question on Items. (BTW it appears that Quicken Home & Business does not support items)
For my comic business, I pay artists (Vendors) for artwork. I'd like to associate the cost of the item (comic) with the sales of each item (comic) to gauge its profitability. It doesn't look like I can do that on Quickbooks Simple Start? Is this possible on Quickbooks Pro?
Also, when I sell the comics, some are sold through a Web Site that charges a fixed 20% sales fee. Others are sold directly through Paypal for a varying fee. Rather than list each customer (there are thousands) I'd like to just have sales by the Web Site and sales by Paypal. Can I automate the 20% fee and input the variable fee each month?
Thanks again!
ANSWER: Hi Jay,
Yes, QuickBooks Pro will track profitability by item, the report is called Item profitability.
In QuickBooks Pro on each expense transaction type (bill, check, credit card charge)
there is an item tab, you would use this tab to enter your purchases of comics.
You could accomplish it several ways.
You could memorize a sales receipt with that the following
Item sold
Discount item =20% (pointing to a sales fee expense
The net transaction being the amount you will actually deposit into your account
Click on the memorized transaction any time you make a sale.
If you are sending this sales receipt to a customer, the above solution would not work
but it does not sound like you would be sending sales receipts from QuickBooks
If you want an easy job of reconciling your bank account, you would want your deposits in QuickBooks to match your bank statement. You might ask your merchant account to
deduct the variable fee once a month instead of after each transaction. If they are deducting on each transaction and depositing the net amount, I recommend using the above procedure to enter
the transaction. If they are separately deducting the fee, then you could add them all up during the month and enter just one transaction.
Hope this helps,
Linda Saltz, CPA
Advanced Certified QuickBooks Advisor
We sell QuickBooks at a discount.
http://www.qbalance.com/Quickbooks.htm
---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------
QUESTION: Hi Linda,
Again, thanks for your assistance and sorry for coming back with what I am sure are pretty dumb questions.
What I want to do is to be able to see quickly the profitability of each of my comics, i.e. gross sales, net sales, cost to produce, net profit. All of my comics are sold by digital download so, except for selling fees paid to third parties, there is no cost associated with each sale. So for "ABC Comic" I want to see the cost and the sales to see the profit for that item, and quickly see whether sales have been sufficient to recoup the initial cost.
At least on Qucken Mac 2010, by using the Item tab on "bills" it seems to deduct the cost to produce an Item directly from sales rather than associating it with an expense. Also, using the "discount" item results in Item reports that do not show the net sales for each item, but instead lists a summary of the total discounts for all items.
Is there a way to create a simple report like the one I described? Perhaps I should call each comic a “Job”? But I sell each of them through more than one customer, so that seems to be a problem as well. If I’m stuck using “Classes” it seems I might as well stick with Quicken Home & Business (although it doesn’t support unit sales)
Thanks, Jay
Answer
Hi Jay,
In QuickBooks you can see one report (PC verssion - Im not sure the Mac has these features)
Qty, Total Sales, %of Sales, Average Price, Cost of goods sold (Cogs), average Cogs, Gross
margin, Gross Margin %
You would need to set items as inventoriable items, with the cost of inventory equal to the
cost to produce. This becomes difficult since you can sell an infinite number of copies.
Also to accumulate the costs to produce and translate that into a per item cost, you would
need the QuickBooks Premeir manufacturer edition (unless the cost to produce is all paid to
one vendor on one bill)
On another report you can see
gross sales, cost to produce
The Item reports will not display net sales or the sales charge
Classes in QuickBooks will provide a profitablity by item without QTY
In QuickBooks if you set up the customer by Comic and then add Jobs
to those customers to represent Customers. You will get a total on your Profit and loss reports
by job, you can change the report to just display the total as long as
you filter the report for just 1 comic (customer). You can memorize the reports
for easy, fast retrieval. The down side is that you cannot create an invoice for more than
one comic, and you if the customer pays for two invoices (comics), you would need to break that
payment into two payment transactions.
There are programmers who can extract the data from QuickBooks and create a custom report for you. But that would be expensive.
Linda Saltz, CPA
Advanced Certfied QuickBooks Advisor
www.qbalance.com
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