Serialized Inventory

Using serial numbers with your inventory items allows you to track individual inventory items from purchase to sale. It also allows you to monitor the specific-cost of every serialized item.

A serial number is generally understood to be a unique number in a sequence that identifies an item as part of a specific production run. Depending on your business, you may want or be legally obliged - for warranty, recall, or safety purposes - to track the serial numbers of items that you buy or manufacture, and then sell.

Rules of Serialization

Because tracking serial numbers requires careful monitoring of individual inventory items, there are a few restrictions that control what can be done with serialized inventory items:

The inventory level cannot drop below zero for serialized items. If an item has a negative inventory level, serialization cannot be turned on for the item.
An item that has a serial number cannot be sold in a fractional quantity. The serialized unit is an item's smallest unit of measure and it is indivisible. It can be an item's buying, selling or stocking unit. For example, if your company uses serial numbers to track 10 litre containers of ethanol, you cannot sell the ethanol in 5 litre volumes to your customers.
Larger units of measure must be evenly divisible by the serialized unit. If the relationship between a serialized unit and any other unit of measure is fractional, serialization cannot be turned on for the item.

Entering Serial Numbers

When you turn on serialization for your company, it does not mean that you need to use serial numbers for every inventory item record. Serialization needs to be turned on for the item records that will use serial numbers. See the rules of serialization to find out if serialization can be turned on for an item.

If you turn serialization on for an item that has stock on-hand, you can either enter the serial numbers right away or you can enter them as the items get sold.

When you buy or build new items that are serialized, you must enter the serial numbers when the transaction is created. There is a serial number generator that you can use to quickly add multiple sequential serial numbers to Sage Simply Accounting at once.

Serialized Inventory

Rules of Serialization

Entering Serial Numbers

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