Inventory Center - Lg
Short and Sweet best describes these Inventory Center features in QuickBooks 2014. This article's illustration pretty-well sums up these minor but important changes. Unfortunately these changes appear to be only affecting "Enterprise" users; we can only hope that many of these changes will filter down to at least Premier level users in the future.
QuickBooks makes it easy to manage your inventory with the Inventory Center. The top-pane shows the details for the inventory item selected in the left-hand pane. Until now you had to click the edit button to make any changes to an inventory item; however, new for QuickBooks 2014 you can edit some fields for an item without clicking the edit button.
You now can easily change an item's cost, sales price, markup, or margin directly within the top-pane. (Note that we now have both markup and margin when editing inventory parts and assemblies.)
- To edit one of these fields simply click inside the field and make your changes, then click the Save button located to the right of these fields.
- If you begin to edit these fields and then change your mind you can click the Revert button located to the right of these to the fields to immediately reset them to the prior values.
This is a real convenience because even if you select the option to 'edit' an Item from either the inventory center or item list, you must then click on Edit Markup button to edit either the Markup or Margin. Also new in QuickBooks 2014, "margin" has been added to the New/Edit Item window and the Edit Markup window for items.
There is also a new field for Inventory Items and Assemblies to specify the Maximum quantity on hand, this is the 'opposite' of your Reorder Points (which are intended to specify your Minimum quantity on hand). QuickBooks Advanced Inventory users will find this as a new column added to the Inventory Site Info window for each item; Non-AI users will find this field located in Inventory Information section at the bottom of the Add/Edit Item Window.
I really like the convenience of these feature changes. Sometimes really nice things come in small packages, and as far as I am concerned that is the case with these changes to the Inventory Center.
I wrote this article based upon pre-release versions of QuickBooks 2014 products, so it is possible that some of the features I described might be slightly different, or updated by the time QuickBooks 2014 is actually released. Over the next few weeks Intuitive Accountant will be reviewing more of the new features, functions and enhancements in the various versions of QuickBooks-2014.