Your first question might be “what is advanced inventory?” Last year, Intuit introduced a new part of the Enterprise version to assist with multiple location inventory tracking. This piece is called “Advanced Inventory” and it is an extra $700.00 per year. With this new feature, companies are able to track their inventory quantities across multiple warehouses and also transfer materials back and forth.
In the 2012 version, you are now able to do more than just track multiple warehouses. Now you can also track FIFO Inventory. QuickBooks was always known for only doing
Average Costing on inventory. I have faced a number of prospects that did not like this. If they wanted FIFO, they would have to use an add-on to track inventory. To turn on FIFO tracking in QuickBooks Enterprise, first make sure you have the Advanced Inventory subscription. Then you can go into your Items & Inventory Company preferences and select Advanced Inventory Settings.
The other new feature within Advanced Inventory is the option to track Lot or Serial numbers. Please note that I say “OR” not “AND”. This is a choice you have to make. You can only track one of the two options. Once you turn on this feature, when you enter in transactions such as Bills, invoices, Sales orders, Quantity Adjustments, Etc., there will be a field asking for the Lot or Serial number. There are definitely some limitations to this
such as you cannot have any spaces in the lot or serial number but this is
definitely a good start to a nice feature.
One thing to make sure of when using any of these features, is if you are using a 3rd party program that interfaces with QuickBooks inventory, make sure that program works with these new features.
