Sales summary: When you don’t need to track every little thing

Here’s a situation. You own a coffee shop. In an hour, you may have 25 customers come in and order anything from a decaf, lowfat, iced latte with two pumps of sugar free vanilla syrup (not that that I know anyone who does that:-) to just a simple cup of coffee. Are you seriously supposed to enter a customer for every order in QuickBooks? That’s crazy talk! When would you ever find time to make those lattes?

If you have a business where you create a large number of sales during the day, you don’t have to track each individual sale in QuickBooks. Chances are, you have cash register and some sort of point-of-sale system you use to track the individual sale. But you still need to get that information into QuickBooks to track the overall finances of your business.

Working with Daily Sales

With QuickBooks, you can summarize your sales at the end of the day rather than entering each sale individually. Just use the Enter Sales Receipt window to record a summary of the day’s sales activity.

1. Choose Customers > Enter Sales Receipts.
2. You can skip the Customer:Job field. You’re creating a sales summary that covers multiple sales to multiple customers, so you don’t need to enter anything. Or you could create a customer name like “Daily Sales Summary.”
3. Enter each item that was sold and how many you sold that day. For example, if you sold 50 lattes just lump all of those together. Select “latte” as your Item and enter 50 as your Amount. Be sure to create a line on the form for each type of item sold that day.
4. Then just keep filling in the sales receipt in a way that works for your situation (tax, deposit, deposit location).
5. Click OK to complete the form.

That’s it! Now your sales for the day are entered.

Here’s a handy tip

You can use your customer lists and classes to give you deeper insight into your sales. Say you have more than one coffee shop and you want to track sales by location. Here’s a couple of ways you can do that:

• You can create a customer and use the location of the coffee shop as the customer name. Then when you create your daily sales receipt, select that location as your customer.
• Create a class for each of your locations. A class is just a category that means something to you, in this case, your store location. Then create a daily summary sales receipt for each location and select the class for that location on the receipt.
• Dividing up sales by location isn’t the only way you can use these methods. You can track sales by sales rep or even cash register if you like. It’s up to you.

Final advice

Now you’re ready to go. One final bit of advice I have is to stay on top of your daily summaries. You don’t want to get too far behind or figure out the right amounts can get tricky for you.

And that decaf, lowfat, iced latte with two pumps of sugar free vanilla syrup? My local coffee shop folks call that order “Shelly’s Why Bother.”