Tips from a business accounting services provider: Assemblies vs Groups

Over the years our accounting consultants for small and medium enterprises, have noticed that many people struggle with the differences between Assemblies and Groups in QuickBooks software. rnWhat is a QuickBooks Inventory Assembly Item? Well, it basically is a kit. Say you are a gift store. You sell teddy bears, chocolates, flowers and balloons. Customers can buy any of the above individual items. You also offer gift baskets. In one of these gift baskets, you will find 1 teddy bear, 2 chocolate bars and a balloon. Now every time you build one of these baskets, you are obviously depleting the inventory on the individual items and increasing the inventory on the full basket. The QuickBooks Inventory assembly item will allow you to do this relatively easily. You create each individual item as an inventory part with its own inventory quantities. Then you create an QuickBooks Inventory Assembly item called Gift basket. At the bottom of the screen when setting up this item, QuickBooks asks for the Bill of Materials. Here you will put in each of the items that the gift basket will use and the quantities that it will use. Once you have that information entered, you will see the Gift Basket in your item list. When it comes time to build one of these baskets, simply go to Vendors>Inventory Activities>Build Assemblies. Choose the item you want to build and tell it the quantity you want to build. Once complete, the system will deplete the inventory of the individual items and increase the quantity of the assembly item. Now, what is a Group Item? The group item is basically just a header item that will automatically pull a bunch of other items onto the sales form without having to choose each one individually. For example, you are a nursery and you sell fertilizer. This fertilizer comes in different steps: step 1, step 2, step 3 and step 4. Now people can buy any step they want or they can buy all 4 steps in one shot. By creating a group item you can give the item a name, such as Joe’s 4 Step Fertilizer Program and tell QuickBooks that all 4 steps are included in this item. Now when you create an invoice for a customer that wants to buy all 4 steps in one shot, you can just choose the “Joe’s 4 Step Fertilizer Program” item and you will see that it will automatically pull all 4 individual items onto the invoice for you. It’s basically a data entry saver. Now that you know the difference between QuickBooks Inventory Assembly Items and Group Items put your knowledge to good use, in order to save time and money.