Sage 50 Setup Guide - Inventory and Service Items

How Do I...

Setting up your company's inventory involves three tasks: setting up inventory defaults, setting up data records for the items your company purchases and sells, and entering inventory beginning balances. So before you begin the process, you should assemble general information about the items that your company deals in. This includes the following for each item:

the default General Ledger accounts you want to use as your sales account, inventory account, and cost of sales account
last unit cost of the item
tax type of item (regular or exempt from taxes)
costing method you use or will use for the item
item UPC/SKU code
item stocking unit of measure
weight
preferred vendor for purchase of the item
preferred buyer (one of your employees) for the item
a history of transactions involving the item; this will help keep your inventory reporting current

You should also be ready to supply information about the following:

Consider the items that your company sells that are subject to and exempt from taxes. You can enter different default tax types for both taxable and non-taxable items, so you want to think about how to categorize your items into tax types.
What different methods does your company use for shipping items (postal service, courier service(s), hand delivery)?
Do you charge different prices for items to different companies? At what different price levels would you like to charge purchasers of your items?

Important! As part of setting up an item record in Sage 50, you enter both an abbreviated code called an ID and a longer description that will help you identify the item. For example, you could set up a item ID "RATCHETL" and a description such as "Left-handed kitchen ratchet." IDs can be a useful shorthand if you establish a meaningful and efficient coding system. Tell me more about using a coding system to set up record IDs.

We recommend you review the topics listed below. They will familiarize you with some of the choices you need to make before setting up inventory.

Inventory Defaults

What are item classes, and how are they used?
What default General Ledger accounts do I want to use to cover my different item classes?
How do I set up default tax and shipping information for items?
What kind of extra item information can I store, and how is it useful?
What are item price levels, and how do I set them up?

Item Records

What kinds of general information should I record about my items?
Where and how do I enter the historical record for items my company sells?
What are assembly items, and how do I set up the components of an assembly?
What are master stock items, and how do I set up master and substock items?

Inventory Beginning Balances

What are inventory item beginning balances, and how do I enter them?

Sage 50 Setup Guide - Inventory and Service Items

Inventory Defaults

Item Records

Inventory Beginning Balances

What do you want to do next?