QuickBooks and inventory: one sku, different color, size

[lissa@listenmedia.com]

Hello,
I have searched all of the forum and I can't find an answer to how to handle this issue. The accounting firm that is handling our quickbooks setup has asked me to have each product have 3 different fields so that quickbooks can subtract out an order and keep track of inventory.
The 3 pieces of info that should be conveyed daily in our download for each sale are: sku, color, size. These 3 pieces of info will ensure that the sale represents a unique item.
We sell clothing. So it is possible that it could be one t-shirt has a sku but comes in different colors and 3 different sizes.
When I looked at how to import products it has one field for the sku and then colors and sizes are in drop-down menus.
My question is it possible to combine the color and size ordered with the sku to make a unique sku for each item ordered.
for example:
ABRN901-Black-S
Or do I need to set it up so that I create one main product and have sub-products attached to the main product, basically an order button for each color and each size. That would look really funny to me, there could be as many as 40 buttons on one page...has anyone else had this issue before? How did you handle it?
Thank you in advance.
Lissa

[ra_design]

So, did anyon eget back to you with an answer on this? I'd like to hear it too. I'd really love it if you could set a value along with the nave when creating options drop downs.
Then we could set something like;
red; EOI234
blue; EOI345
or even
red size 3; KJU234

So the drop down options could control SKU.
Although I guess wouldn't work if you made color and size each a differnt SKU.. but still would help many of us....

[lissa@listenmedia.com]

hello,
I still haven't gotten any replies to this issue. I assume that other clothing or shoe companies need to have their accounting systems (quickbooks in my case) keep track of what is sold on their sites. Any advice on how they handle this issue of colors and sizes would be appreciated. I created a sample product and sale and when I did the download the only field that showed up was the title and sku and as I mentioned above I also need to track color and size.
I have read some posts about "The Stone Edge Order Manager", if anyone that represents this software can tell me if purchasing this would help solve my issue? I read on your site you export to quickbooks. Maybe I can use a combination of the 2 to achieve what I need.
And Shopsite, please help...I posted this a few days ago and yet no one has addressed my issue, even a simple "no, we can't achieve this" would help me greatly as I need to make a decision and have some sort of resolution even if it is a new cart...my client is getting very anxious for an answer! Please help!
[/i]

[Jim]

If you need to keep inventory on items based on sku, size, and color then you need to create a separate sku for each type of item by size and color. There is no way to have the sku modified in ShopSite to add the size and color to the sku value.

Create a main product e.g. T-shirt and product for Small Red, Small Blue, Small White, Medium Red, Med Blue etc each with a separate sku.
You can then assign all of the various size/color combination as subproducts to T-shirt. The way the subproducts display depends on the product template that is used. (standard template layout) I have seen them displayed as individual products each with an Add to Cart button, as individual products with a check box to mark the items the shopper want to purchase (multi-add to cart) and a single Add to cart that adds all the selected items to the cart and I have seen the subproducts displayed in a dropdown list so the shopper selects the item in the list and then clicks an add to cart that adds that item to the cart. (dropdown subproduct)

Examples of how to implement the multi-product add to cart and the dropdown list have been posted to the forum previously so you should be able to search the forum and find the code. You can also search the ShopSite help for "multi" and it will bring up an example of using the multi product add to cart page and product templates. Here is one link to the dropdown approach.
http://support.shopsite.com/forums/view ... subproduct

[lissa@listenmedia.com]

Thank you for your reply, I think that those are good examples of how to handle this issue, even if they aren't perfect at least it is solution that will work. Thank you.

[Barney Stone]

You might want to consider using the Stone Edge Order Manager (www.StoneEdge.com/OrderManager.htm). The Order Manager is designed to handle inventory with options like color and size. You use ShopSite normally, with just the "parent SKU" and its option lists for color, size, etc. When the orders are imported into the Order Manager, the program combines the parent SKU with the selected options to generate a "sub SKU", which is what goes into the order. That lets you keep things simple in ShopSite, and still track your inventory properly.

The Order Manager also gets around one of the biggest problems with QuickBooks: it is limited to 14,500 orders, customers and products. The product limit in particular could easily cause you problems if you have to have a separate product in QB for each color/size combination. For example, if each product comes in 4 sizes and 5 colors, you would only be able to have 725 products before you run into QB's limit!

The Order Manager exports summary data to QuickBooks (which avoids the 14,500 limits) so you have the best of both worlds: run your day-to-day operations with the Order Manager, and use QB for tax accounting and balancing your checkbook.

Give us a call at 215-641-1837 if you would like to discuss how the Stone Edge Order Manager can help you run your business more efficiently.