Year End Prep

Fishbowl Advanced offers a number of features to help with year-end inventory preparation. You can use its cycle counting, QuickBooks integration, and more to clean up your data in preparation for the New Year, as well as tax season.

Cycle counting

Cycle counting is the act of checking the number of units currently in stock in a warehouse. This can be done on a regular basis or as a one-time job. We recommend performing cycle counts on at least a monthly basis to correct any discrepancies in your inventory counts. You can do one big cycle count at the end of the year, but it helps to keep your inventory records accurate throughout the year for reordering purposes.

With the Cycle module in Fishbowl Advanced Mobile, you are able to scan parts on the shelf with a barcode scanner and either confirm that their quantity is accurate or update the number to reflect what is in stock.

Matching numbers in Fishbowl and QuickBooks

It is a good idea to reconcile your QuickBooks inventory accounts with the numbers in the Fishbowl sub-ledger. Unless you’ve made a copy of your database at month end, QuickBooks and Fishbowl can only be reconciled as of now.

The report you should use to do this will change depending on the costing method you use in Fishbowl:

• Average Cost – Use either the Inventory Valuation Summary or the Asset Valuation by Account.
• LIFO/FIFO Cost – Use the Asset Valuation by Account.
• Standard Cost – Use either the Inventory Valuation Summary or the Asset Valuation by Account.

Here’s the process we recommend you follow:

• Post all transactions to QuickBooks through the Fishbowl Accounting Export.
• Run the appropriate valuation report. Note the total dollars.
• Run a QuickBooks balance sheet for all dates (you can have transactions dated after today’s date). Match the total of the appropriate valuation report to the QuickBooks inventory account(s).

If there is a difference, you can troubleshoot.

Troubleshooting

First, check your mappings in Fishbowl to QuickBooks. For example, if you were mapping your cycle count adjustments back to inventory, it could lead to the following situation: inventory is no longer in Fishbowl but the dollars, instead of crediting inventory and debiting expense, are debited and credited to inventory, creating a zero adjustment and leaving the QuickBooks asset account too high.

Next, understand that if the mappings are correct, the problem is on the QuickBooks side. There should never be a manual entry to the QuickBooks inventory account. There should also never be a bill correction or credit memo to the QuickBooks inventory account. You should never delete a bill or any other transaction affecting inventory that originated in Fishbowl. Ideally, Fishbowl would be the only user to ever create or modify an inventory transaction.

It may not seem like the discrepancy could be on the QuickBooks side. But it is possible. There was once a Fishbowl customer with $2 million worth of inventory in Fishbowl and only $1 million in the QuickBooks inventory account. They did a rollback on their inventory transactions from Fishbowl and found that nearly everything matched the transactions posted in QuickBooks. So they reenabled inventory in QuickBooks to run a QuickBooks inventory valuation report as of the day before they went live with Fishbowl. The result? The QuickBooks inventory sub-ledger was $1 million higher than the Inventory Asset account before they went live. Mystery solved.

Troubleshooting with additional tools

To track down the offending transactions, you have the following tools available to you in QuickBooks and Fishbowl:

Fishbowl accounting reports

• Adjustment Report – This report shows all adjustments for a time period or by adjustment type.
• COGS by Account Summary – This shows everything posted to Cost of Goods Sold. Non-inventory and service parts may be mapped to this account. Therefore, the total is not necessarily what was retrieved from inventory.
• Export Summary – This can be run for purchase orders, sales orders, and work orders, separately or together. The drawback here is that it is a total of the activity for each type of transaction, not a breakout of what was posted to inventory. The same limitations regarding non-inventory, service, labor and other part types applies to this report, as well as the COGS by Account Summary.

QuickBooks tools

• Audit Trail – The audit trail details all changes to transactions in the QuickBooks database. It identifies what changed by bolding the text.
• Voided/Deleted Transactions Summary and Detail – These reports can quickly identify if a user has deleted or voided a transaction. It’s even easier to use than the audit trail.
• Closing Date Exception Report – This report is helpful if you have set a closing date for your time period, listing only what has changed since the closing date was set. However, if the closing date is removed, the data in this report is cleared.
• Custom Transaction Detail Reports – Modified to display LastModifiedDate and LastModifiedBy. With these reports, you can look for inventory transactions that were modified by someone other than the Fishbowl user or where the LastModifiedDate is different than the transaction date. These date sorts can sometimes help you identify transactions posted in incorrect time periods.

Data cleanup

There are many things you can do to clean up your data in Fishbowl Advanced. You can do these at any time, but the end of the year is certainly a good time to do it. Here are some helpful examples:

• Update order statuses to reflect their true statuses.
• Comb through your part/product list and inactivate any old or unused items.
• Clean up and inactivate any old or unused customers and vendors.