Writing off inventory, properly
Stock that vanishes without paperwork is indistinguishable from theft — including to your insurer and the CRA. The fix is a two-minute discipline.
1. Decide the reason
Damage, expiry, loss, or count correction. The reason drives the account and, later, the pattern you can act on.
2. Post the adjustment
Inventory → Adjustments → New. Pick the items, quantities, and the reason. SeroBooks values the write-off at cost and posts it.
3. Keep the note
Print the write-off note for the damage bin or the count file. When someone asks in eight months, the answer is a document.
4. Watch the pattern
One write-off is housekeeping. The same product written off monthly is a buying problem, a handling problem, or a walking-out-the-door problem — the reasons you recorded tell you which.
The mistake: adjusting instead of investigating
A count that does not match is almost never a counting problem. Before writing anything off, look for the missing purchase, the delivery received but never posted, the transfer nobody booked in, and the held sale still reserving stock. Adjusting over any of those hides the real cause — and it will recur next month, slightly larger.
Negative stock is the clearest example: it cannot physically exist, so it is always paperwork. Entering the missing purchase fixes both the count and the cost; adjusting fixes only the count and loses the money.
Damage and correction are different events
A breakage is a loss with a value; a miscount is an error with none. Recording both as the same thing makes shrink unreadable, which means nobody can tell theft from sloppiness. Separate them and the pattern becomes visible within a quarter.
Every write-off deserves a reason written for whoever reads the report in six months — 'broken in the stockroom' beats 'adjustment'.
What SeroBooks does with this
Adjustments record who made them and why, split damage/loss from correction, post to the ledger, and appear in the damaged-goods report with warehouse and reason. Several lines can ride one adjustment, so the Monday breakage round is one document.
For supplier goods, a purchase return recovers the money where a write-off would lose it — which is why the two are separate flows.