If you’ve decided tracking inventory in Ambrook is right for your kind of business, the next important thing is determining precisely what you want to track.
In general, you should track something as inventory if:
It stays in your possession for a while (more than 1 month)
It has measurable quantities you can reliably count over time
It is something you or a lender would want represented as a line on your balance sheet
Conversely, there are also some kinds of complexity that you may not want to track in Ambrook today, and may instead want to use a spreadsheet or specialized program for. This may change over time as we continue adding to our inventory feature set, but these currently include:
Items with inconsistent units of measure (you buy or produce them in one quantity, then sell them in another)
Items produced by combining multiple other items
Items that are sold immediately
Finally, there may be things that you hold onto for a long period of time but are not inventory in accounting terms. Namely, these are fixed assets like machinery, equipment, or breeding stock. While you can use Ambrook to track the quantities of these kinds of things, they are typically subject to depreciation and do not incur costs of goods sold when disposed of. We do not typically recommend tracking these in Ambrook with our inventory feature.
As a rule of thumb, things you hold for 24+ months would likely be tracked as fixed assets, whereas things you hold for less than 24 months would be inventory, but it’s always best to consult your accountant if you are unsure. If you want help thinking through your item setup, please feel free to reach out to our support team.
Ambrook’s inventory system is made up of two components:
Items: These are the specific SKUs that you want to track. Different item variants often have particular, unique characteristics e.g. they are a certain color, size, or weight.
Groups: Collections of similar items that appear in groups both in the item catalog and in some reports
Typically, it makes sense to make an inventory item its own variant if you will need to know the exact quantity or cost of something.
For example, if you track feed inventory you will likely want to know the difference counts of your alfalfa bales versus your hay bales. However, as a trivial example of what wouldn’t make sense to have as their own variants, you likely will not need to know the different costs of your lighter calves versus your darker ones.