Accounting Method?

[bigben710]

Hello,

I know there is numerous articles about accounting methods for full-line vending, however most of them are several years old and don’t mention many of the options that are out there today..

What do you guys use? What would you recommend for a small operation? (5 locations 8 machines)

I use a route card in excel to tell me what I want to know about inventory, however, I am not knowledgeable enough about it to trust myself using it for accounting.

QuickBooks online is one I see mentioned a lot, however 25$/month is not something I can justify paying at this point. Anybody know of a more cost effective option?

Thanks,

Ben

[WhiteRoom]

I use GnuCash, its a free shareware accounting program (PC, not sure if it is available for Mac).  Full double entry accounting, lots of preset expense accounts, decent reports for end of year.  I haven't tried to see if it will handle inventory - I just do inventory once a year and adjust my COGS by that annually.  The cost is right, and my accountant seems happy with the reports it puts out.  If you have no accounting experience, you might struggle a bit with paying yourself profits, I run it thru the preset RE and dividend accounts.  I also don't have any employees, so I am not worrying about wages and payroll and all that.

[AngryChris]

How do you do cogs annually?  Do you have a separate software or do you slave away doing all of your expenses at once?

[WhiteRoom]

I input stock purchases all year long (as well as all other expenses and revenue).  Each year end, I do a physical inventory of machines and warehouse stock.  Then you just adjust purchases by the change in inventory to get COGS.  Let's say beginning inventory was $1,000.  You buy $50k of stock throughout the year and your end of year inventory is $2,000. COGS was $49k.

[AngryChris]

Oh.  I don't bother with that.  I don't think the IRS is going to care either unless you have a significant amount in inventory.  Maybe if you had almost 1 million in annual sales...

[bigben710]

On 7/11/2020 at 7:26 PM, WhiteRoom said:

I use GnuCash, its a free shareware accounting program (PC, not sure if it is available for Mac).  Full double entry accounting, lots of preset expense accounts, decent reports for end of year.  I haven't tried to see if it will handle inventory - I just do inventory once a year and adjust my COGS by that annually.  The cost is right, and my accountant seems happy with the reports it puts out.  If you have no accounting experience, you might struggle a bit with paying yourself profits, I run it thru the preset RE and dividend accounts.  I also don't have any employees, so I am not worrying about wages and payroll and all that.

This will be perfect. Thanks!