Creating Items for Domain Names

Glad you're enjoying getting FA setup.  For me, it's been a bit traumatic but the support 'round here is fantastic so it's finally taking shape.

You should probably talk to your accountant about how best to setup FA for your business.  Having said that, the main advantage for setting up each domain as a separate item is that you'll be able to track revenues/expenditures by domain.  If you create one item called "domains" and make it editable, all revenues/expenses coded to that item get lumped together, so if you want to split-out transactions later for analysis it will be more difficult.

On the flip side, creating separate items for each domain is (of course!) more work, and if you buy/sell a lot of domains managing things can get cumbersome.  So, I guess you have to decide if the extra work and risk of things getting a bit cumbersome is with having the ability to analyze revenues/expenses on a per-domain basis.

Hope that's helpful, or at least gives you some things to think about.

Regards,

Chris

Again, it's best to talk to your accountant about the best way to establish your chart of accounts and items to meet your business needs.  I'm only offering "things to think about" as opposed to accounting advice.  Your requirements will be unique to your specific business, so only you can decide what's "best" for your business.

The same comments I made before apply whether you're only recording expenses or whether you're recording both revenues and expenses for an item.  Since you're creating "service" items for domains, nothing is hitting inventory so all tracking/analysis takes place through GL reports (trial balance, balance sheet, income/expense, etc.)  If you don't need to separately track/analyze expenses for internal domains, then creating one item called "internal domains" will do.  But, if you need to analyze/track expenses for internal-only domains separately, then your choices are:

• create individual items for each internal domain, or

• create separate GL expense accounts for each internal domain

The latter way (separate GL expense accounts for each internal domain) gets messy quickly, but if you only have one or two internal domains and not a lot of GL expense accounts it's doable.

Anyway, the "bottom line" is what you think your future reporting/tracking/analyzing needs are going to be.  Think very long and hard about this NOW, before you start entering transactions into FA.  While you can change things around later, it gets quite time-consuming and messy doing so, and you'll lose the consistency and continuity in your records.  So, it's better to decide one way or another now and stick to it rather than rushing into a decision and finding out later it should have been done another way.

Hope all this is helpful.  Again, maybe have a chat with your accountant.

Regards,

Chris

FYI, I'm fairly new to FA too, so I'm still learning about how it works too.

Yes, the Direct Invoice function allows you to enter a supplier invoice without having to create a purchase order and goods received note.  There's also a Direct Invoice function in the sales modules which allows you to invoice a customer without going through the quotation -> order -> deliver -> invoice process.  I use both the sales and purchasing Direct Invoice functions because I'm a small, one-man operation so I seldom need to go through the full processes.  The only time I use the Sales Quotation function is if I'm asked for a quotation and the customer insists on a formal, written quote.  Other than that, I skip right to the invoice.

Another set of functionalities you might want to look into are Quick Entries.  When using the Direct Invoice functions in sales and purchasing, you must create an item and supplier/customer.  The Quick Entry functions allow you to bypass all that and post entries directly to the GL.  I use quick entries for repetitive monthly entries (e.g. rent, utilities, etc.) and for one-time transactions where it isn't worth the time/effort to set-up a customer/supplier and/or item.  As well, you can use quick entries to do some pretty fancy calculations before posting the transaction.  For instance, I work out of my home so my monthly rent and utilities quick entries do an automatic split between personal and business costs, and only posts the business costs to my GL.  It's a bit complex to figure it out at first, but ver handy once you do.  Check it out!

Anyway, I'm glad my comments were helpful.  I'm not a programmer so I can't contribute much on the technical side of FA, but I do try and contribute on the non-technical side when I can.

Regards,

Chris

Hey guys. Thanks for all the help. I just wanted to share with you what I decided to do. I ended up using dimensions for all my different projects both internal and external so I could breakup income and expense reports by project, even if I am working on multiple projects for one client.

I did create items for some of my domains, but only the ones I sell to clients ands manage for them and created them as service items. The reason I didn't make items for all my internal domains is because although service items don't update the inventory GL account, they do update the "qty on hand" number for the item. That's fine for an item I buy and invoice to a customer because it will net 0 on hand. But for domains I buy internally and never sell (expenses) the on hand number would keep increasing because it would never get sold (and of course I don't have two of the same domain at once). So for those I just enter a supplier invoice and use the GL accounts.

Maybe you guys know of a way I can not use the "qty on hand" field for internal items, but I couldn't find another way. So I decided to only use items for sellable items.

Does this seem like a reasonable approach? Just wanted to share my thought process and see if you guys had any thoughts in it.

Thanks again for all the help!

-Chris

"Sell" internal domains to yourself for possibly $0/-.