#inventory
Inventory tracking, valuation, and management for businesses
A surf or dive shop is six businesses under one roof — school, retail, travel, rental, air fills, and repair — sharing one seasonal cash window. Learn how separate revenue lines, deferred-revenue accounting for prepaid lessons, and 12-month cash forecasting that isolates inventory purchases reveal which business actually profits and whether summer funds the winter.
Starting November 4, 2026, SNAP-authorized small stores must stock 7 varieties in each of 4 staple food categories — 84 units total, up from 36 — with perishables in 3 categories, or risk losing EBT authorization. How to map varieties, track depth, flag perishables, and file invoices in your books before an FNS inspection.
USPS cut its dimensional-weight divisor from 166 to 139 on July 12, 2026, raising DIM weight roughly 19.4% on bulky-but-light parcels and adding a $3 per-parcel fee for missing or inaccurate dimensions on commercial manifests.
A guide to the three bookkeeping fault lines that distort a wholesale distributor's margin and balance sheet — capitalizing freight-in into landed cost, accruing vendor rebates as a contra-COGS reduction instead of income, and tracking consignment inventory by location and ownership — plus a monthly close checklist and journal entries.
A 100% Section 232 tariff on patented drugs and APIs hits smaller manufacturers on September 29, 2026; here is how independent pharmacies and specialty clinics should audit country of origin, separate tariff in landed cost, and manage the working-capital lag before the cost passes through.
Event rental fleet is a depreciable fixed asset, not COGS; booking deposits, damage holds, and forfeitures uses deferred-revenue and refundable-liability accounts, and cycle-counting shrinkage as its own line keeps 8–12% linen loss from silently eating your margin.
Under GAAP's ASC 330, inventory must be carried at the lower of cost or net realizable value. This guide shows small businesses how to calculate NRV, book the write-down, document it for the IRS, and avoid the book-tax timing trap.
A contract-level bookkeeping system for cleaning and janitorial businesses—job costing by contract, a payroll-to-revenue dial that says when you can hire, and a 10-minute supply inventory method—so you can bid with real numbers and spot losing contracts before they drag the quarter.
Paint-and-sip and candle studios ring one ticket that is three revenue types, two tax treatments, and a deferred liability. Here is how to split ticket, beverage, and retail revenue at the POS, book gift cards and deposits as deferred revenue, and track pour cost so month-end takes 30 minutes.
The FDA's Food Traceability Rule (FSMA 204) requires covered businesses to produce lot-level records in a sortable electronic spreadsheet within 24 hours and retain them for two years. The compliance date moved from January 20, 2026 to a proposed July 20, 2028 — here is what CTEs, KDEs, and traceability lot codes require, which 15 commodity categories are covered, and how to build the records now.
A 3PL never owns your inventory — it stays on your balance sheet at cost until a customer buys it. Map the fee stack (receiving, storage, pick/pack, returns) to a chart of accounts, post the five journal entries you actually need, reconcile WMS on-hand to your ledger monthly, and apply LCNRV write-downs to aged stock under ASC 330.
ASC 606 treats a right of return as variable consideration, so an $80,000 sales month with a 9% historical return rate is $72,800 of net revenue, a $7,200 refund liability, and a recoverable-inventory asset — not $80,000 booked as final. This guide shows how to build a category-weighted reserve from 12 months of your own data, flag the 5 to 10% of buyers who generate 30 to 40% of returns, and apply graduated account limits that stay documented and defensible.
