We have products in our showroom that are inventory but not available for sale until we decide to swap the display model out. Has anyone discovered an easy way to make this inventory appear as allocated so it doesn’t show as ‘available’ in sales orders or purchase orders? I thought about making an internal sales order marked as approved with all the items on it. Any better ideas?
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I agree. There should be a way to mark the Status of a distinct piece of inventory (not an entire Item regardless of quantity).
Have you tried creating another location for just the showroom? We have done that with some of our demo equipment in the past. I’m curious to see if that would be an applicable option for this.
We have a ‘showroom’ location but the item will still show up as available on the SO, PO and Stock Status.
Striven’s suggestion is to create a SO for your own company, mark it approved and put your showroom items on it and remove them as needed.
There is a more correct way of handling display items that are not immediately intended for sale and Striven has the tools that make it pretty easy.
For accounting purposes, it’s not only important that these items don’t show up in your inventory, but also are moved from your inventory asset account to another current asset account, typically called “Display Asset” or “Obsolete Inventory Asset” as a contra asset account because once it is on display, it is no longer sellable inventory and your accountant may want to indicate closeout, or depreciated value items separately on reports.
To set this up, create a new manufactured item called “Display-1” or “FPD-01” where FPD stands for Fireplace Display and the number is just a count of items you’ve created. IE: Display-12, Display-13, …, Display-1028
It is important not to use the part number of the main display item (fireplace, grill, washing machine, etc) in the searchable fields, so this item doesn’t populate when someone is trying to sell a normal inventory version. Another trick is to add “DO NOT SELL” at the start of the description to keep people from selling displays you don’t want sold.
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Enter the main item, all of the accessories, installation sundries and labor to install and finish the display in the Bill of Materials. Calculate your cost, your markup and sales price. You can give it a negative markup if you plan to expense your depreciation by selling the item at a loss in the future.
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You can leave the standard Product Income as the account, or if you can change it to Income From Sales of Assets to be able separate the account in sales reports.
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Make it serialized if you want to track it separately from the individual item serial numbers.
Then, when you actually move inventory to a display, you build that item. It removes the individual parts out of available inventory because they have been used in an assembly. The new display item will appear in inventory.
When you decide that a display needs to be changed, and you are willing to sell it, rename the item build by adding “Closeout” to the name, such as ‘Closeout-[[display item build name]]’. This will make it easy to let salespeople know it is now ok to sell, and create Closeout item lists, with pricing and inventory status if you wish for the front counter, or for your staff’s dashboards.
This is also great for anything you want to move quickly, scratch-n-dent, display or overstock items. Create new manufactured items and add some arbitrary amount of labor to cover ‘handling costs’ and you can ‘build’ all of those items into Closeout items. Just consider your naming convention before you get started. You may want to separate your closeout manufactured items by class, division, product type, etc… to be able to group them in your reports. IE: Closeout-Display, Closeout-Grill, Closeout-Accessory, Closeout-Glass, Closeout-Locks
Once sold, make the item inactive by regularly deactivating items that are no longer ‘on hand’. Since Striven is FIFO accounting with regard to inventory, you could reuse your manufactured items, but it’s cleaner to create new each time you have the need.
Greetings Adam,
Yes, as you mentioned, it is suggested to create a sales order for your company and mark it approved and add the showroom items on it and remove them as needed.
The suggestion given by Darin Bricker sounds interesting, you can try that too and reach out to us if you need any assistance in the process.
Thank you Darin Bricker for the detailed suggestions.