Product Discounts & Gross Margins & Sales Reports

You are discounting the invoice, not the individual item(s). In what way would an overall discount apply to your COGS?

Have you tried price levels, applied to individual items? That may be what you need.

Is Price Levels in QB Basic?

Our customers like for us to show the "Retail Price" and then the Applied Discount...

thanks for any additional comments.

Will

I think you'll have to set up a item for the discount, not of type discount. Cross it to your COGS accounts.

Disagree with the Girls - a discount is not a cost of goods sold.

The Price Levels feature is not included in QB Basic so that is not an option.

Will, your problem is just that you have linked the Discount item to the wrong account. Sounds as though you have linked it to an Other Income or Other Expense, or possibly an Expense account. Change it to an Income account.

Invoice...

really

!-!,

I set up the Item Discounts account equal to Sales... Same as I have the Iventory Item Income Account setup equal to Sales

Two things...

1 - If you have 5 items on your invoice and each is discounted 40%... you can not use a single "discount item" for the invoice... you have to insert the 40% discount item after each of the 5 items or the total discount will not be correct. (So, QB knows what Inventory Item each Discount Item is applied to.)

2 - Even though you do this... when you you run the Sales by Item Summary Report... QB ignores the applied discount for each inventory item and uses the un-discounted (Retail ) price to calculate the Gross Margin for each Inventory Item. (Discounts are shown at the bottom of the report nut not used in the GM calculation.)

The only solution I can see is for us to put the "Suggested Retail Price" in the Product Discription field and manually calculate the Wholesale Price for each line item on the Invoice. This is a pain and sure to cause errors over time...

Hopefully, I am missing something so, please, jump in and educate me...

thanks - Will

Sorry Will, this time you know what you are talking about. What you may be mistaken about is the need to disclose this information on the invoice in the first place. It never stops to amaze me to what great heights users will climb to make things as complicated as possible. KISS baby KISS. "Keep it simple stupid".

In many case a simple statement on the bottom of the invoice that the customer's standard discount rates have been applied to all pricing is all that is needed.