Writing off inventory

Sometimes a situation may occur where inventory needs to be written off. This is common when dealing with product that expires such as food. This article will explain your options for writing inventory off.

From time-to-time inventory may need to be written off. This could either be due to inventory expiring, being damaged during picking or even just inventory being given away as samples at a trade show/convention. Acctivate offers an "Inventory Issue" transaction which allows you to effortlessly write off this inventory towards a user selected GL account. 

You can create an inventory issue by selecting  Inventory > Enter Issues

From here you can select the warehouse to issue against, select the desired GL offset account, and enter in your products and their quantities. Positive quantities would be deducted from inventory, and negative quantities would be added to inventory.

Here's an example of an inventory issue to write off units of unsellable product:

As you can see, Southwestern Industries is writing off five cases of NYStrip for being spoiled, and 10 Executive Desks for being damaged. They're writing it off against their Written Off Inventory expense account. That journal transaction would look like so in QuickBooks:

For a step-by-step guide on creating and posting Inventory issues, please refer to our training guide.