I am small business retailer new to Quickbooks and would greatly appreciate any suggestions for setting up my chart of accounts.
I am installing QB Premier 2004 for Retail to track my financial and QB POS Pro Multi-Store for my inventory management.
I am a retailer that imports a wide variety of ethnic merchandise from 10 countries. They are sold at 2 brick and morter store locations and by shows(trade/wholesale and via festivals). I have a wide variety of products from each of these countries and want to manage my inventory and costs better hence the POS. I also want to determine which location is most/least profitable and of course by what products since the customers are very different at each of these sites. I would appreciate some idea about how to best organize my data in the chart of accounts in Premier 2004 and I have some questions-

1) How do I best track details of the various products from each of these 10 countries that I am selling while tracking the P&L by location without creating a 10 page chart of accounts?
2) Since I will be tracking what I sell and will be generating receipts/etc in the POS is it true that I can't use the Items list in the financial software to simplify my chart of accounts? How I set it up presently is by using parent accounts with location indicated in the parent line item with a lot of subaccounts
(such as Merchandise Sales-> (Income account)
location 1 subitem
8 product groups (subitems of subitem)

(I also created parent accounts for expenses by location with overhead broken down in multiple subaccounts by rent and utilities etc since I have high fixed costs and might need to close one store)
3) I understand that class only lets you track income and expense by that category not any Balance Sheet items. Is there an advantage of using subaccounts where I designate the location in the parent line item account with the subaccounts like I have so far where I avoided using class by location altogether or can I use class on the income and expense line items and still use subaccounts with the Balance Sheet line items if I need to break them down?
Thanks
Sils

I don't know about the POS program but if you want to track different locations then you should set each one up as a Class (you have to turn on class tracking under your Edit/Preferences section). Then make sure that all transactions show the correct class on them. Then you can run P&L by Class reports to get an accurate picture or each location. Then you only need one account for sales but the class report will break it out by location. You only need to set up one chart of accounts with one account for each income or expenses or inventory in it. The class is what will break it out for you by location.

In the multi-store, the financial software will generate the report you want under Merchadise Reports. The vendor will be the unique separator.

Your financial software will be able to look at the vendor, but not by store. You will have to view each store report separately for determination.

Page 337 of user's guide.

Paul Falada
Certified ProAdvisor
Certified POS ProAdvisor