IT side here, but I'm driving a project that is creating accounting process changes, so I need to be somewhat knowledgeable for my own purposes and I would like to have perspectives and opinions from others outside of who I have immediately available. This company sells lots of things. For this scope, consider retail, drop ship, and small to large installation projects (not manufacturing, but physical installation along with programming). Right now, PO's we invoice match go straight to COGS. We want to move towards using inventory asset accounts and I have a few questions/concerns. 1. We have multiple departments; Installations, Retail, Commercial Sales (dropships primarily). Do we need, or is there a good justification to use multiple inventory asset accounts? 2. It *sounds* like the use of a Work In Progress account to hold the value of product while an installation project is ongoing is a good idea, is this typical for non-manufacturing operations? The downside to this is with our solution we would have to do manual transfers of any inventory items to the WIP account. 3. Is it standard practice to have sales invoices with both inventory and non-inventory items on it, and have entries applied to COGS at different times? We almost always have miscellaneous materials line items on our invoices and these would be non-inventory type items (hardware, cables, connectors). Would it be wise to create a different series of COGS specifically for inventory items so they are easily discernible? 4. Sort of a factor of the previous question, how *should* we handle misc. hardware and non-inventory goods for sale moving forward? Should that even go to COGS immediately, should it go to an expense account, or something else? Most of these items we purchase via PO's with specific items, however we do not want to track them or sell them itemized. 5. For dropships, in the scenario that we receive/invoice match from the vendor before we sales invoice the customer, should I have another account to use instead of an the inventory asset account, since in reality it is not in our possession at any time? Thanks much for any opinions or feedback!
