Submitted by Will on September 19, 2014

Q & A with Will English

Today’s topic: Assigning Paper Bags to an Account in QBPOS & QBF

Client’s employee: I can set the bags up in QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS) as a Non-Inventory Item:  POS will track the monies collected and we won’t have to include the bag as an item to count when we do year-end inventory.  POS will need to liaise with a QB acct:  what do you want that to be?  (ie, Do these need to be defined as COGS and as income?)  If this item is considered an Income Acct, I’m not sure if that puts the item over into a sales tax category. 

Client’s question: We recently decided to purchase paper bags in case our customers want to buy one (like the supermarkets do). The rules on this seem a bit hazy, but it appears that 1) we are supposed to collect the money, but 2) we can only spend it on buying more bags. We need some advice on how to account for these (and the collected money) in POS & QuickBooks Financial.

Will: Create a non-inventory item Paper Bag with a charge of 10 cents or whatever you want to charge.  Create an Other current asset account called Paper Bag Replacement.  Every time you sell a paper bag, it will add to this account. When you buy more bags, code the check to this account. The balance is what you have available to spend on bags.