How to Manage Your Inventory

If you have yet to track your inventory or are new to Direct Sidekick, you’ll want to do these two things first to get set up.

Import your beginning (existing) inventory. You can import a CSV file with your item number (SKU), item name, quantity, and average cost. The average cost is what you actually spent on your items. This step will require a physical count if you need to know how many of each item you have on hand.
Import your default product list (optional). When you import your beginning inventory in Direct Sidekick, it also adds those items to your product list. You can import your product list with those two numbers to update the cost and retail numbers, and Direct Sidekick will update them. This also comes in handy if/when your company changes its prices in the future.

Step 1: Add units of your products into inventory using purchase orders (PO’s).

Use purchase orders to add products to your “personal home inventory” for resale. Do not enter your customer orders into Direct Sidekick. Your income from those orders is automatically tracked daily when your transactions are imported.

Most customers match the PO number they receive from their company for easy lookup later.

Start a purchase by clicking the button in the top right of your purchase list.
Enter the shipping & handling amount you were charged by your company and any tax applied to it.
Search for and add the products to your PO.
Enter the number of units and your cost per unit.
Select whether you were taxed on the product or not.

If we’re not already working with your company on automatically importing your purchases for you, we’d love to chat with someone at your company about that. Our goal is to make your job easier, and I know your company would like to as well!

Please email your company’s Field Support or Sales department and CC steve@directsidekick.com, letting them know how Direct Sidekick is helping your business and how connecting with your company’s back office would help you.

Step 2: Remove SOLD units of your products from inventory using invoices.

Navigate to your invoices list under the Inventory menu tab.
Click the “+ New Invoice” button.
Now complete this form with whichever products you would like to invoice your customer for and click the save button. This will remove the items from inventory.

Pay close attention to the Add to Income checkbox on your invoices. If it’s checked, the grand total of the invoice is added to your income. If you also have your deposit account connected. The deposit will automatically be imported and categorized as income. This would lead to counting this amount twice, which we do not want to happen. You’ll want to have one or the other happen, not both.

When removing stock from inventory, the items’ costs are automatically added to cost of goods sold (COGS). Do not add a separate transaction for the cost of goods sold.

Step 3: Remove inventory used in demos, giveaways, for advertising reasons, or personal use using adjustments.

Navigate to the adjustments list under the Inventory menu tab.
Click the “New adjustment” button.
Choose the type of adjustment. Did you demo a product, give something away for advertising reasons, or use something for personal reasons?
Enter the products you want to remove and save the adjustment.

After following this process, your Cost of Goods Sold and Profit & Loss reports are automatically updated. Those are the two reports you’ll need to finish your taxes each year AND to review how much you’re earning in your business.