Sales → Items & stock (at /items) is where you keep the things you sell. It's on the Business plan and up.
Who it's for
This is stock control for invoice-based selling — wholesalers, distributors, traders, and service businesses that fit parts (an IT company selling laptops with support, a plumber charging for a geyser). You quote, you invoice, you get paid by EFT.
It is not a point-of-sale. There's no till, no barcode scanner and no cash-up. A shop selling to walk-in customers over a counter needs a POS system, not this.
The one idea that makes it work
Buying stock is not an expense. When you buy goods to resell, you swap cash for goods — you're no worse off. So a stock line on a bill lands in an Inventory account (an asset) and sits on your balance sheet.
The cost only becomes Cost of Sales at the moment you issue the invoice — matched against the sale that earned it. That's what makes your gross profit real. Get this wrong and you show a loss in the month you stock up and a fake profit in the month you sell.
Four accounts do the work — Inventory (1400), Cost of Sales (5000), Stock adjustments (5090) for losses that happened, and Inventory write-down (5091) for stock that is still there but worth less — plus Retained Earnings (3100) for opening balances. If your chart of accounts doesn't have them, 360books creates them the first time they're needed; if you already have your own, it uses yours. You can change the defaults under Settings.
Adding an item
Click + Add item and give it an item code (unique, e.g. PMP-750) and a name. Then choose the type:
- Stock item — you keep it on a shelf. Quantity is tracked, and selling it posts cost of sales.
- Service — nothing to count. Behaves exactly like an ordinary invoice line: no quantity, no cost of sales. Use it for labour, callouts and retainers so everything you sell lives in one list.
Pick carefully — the type can't be changed once an item exists. You'd have to deactivate it and create a new one.
You also set the selling price excl. VAT, the VAT rate, and optionally Tell me when stock drops to — the reorder level that triggers a low-stock warning. The income, cost-of-sales and inventory accounts come from your company defaults, and you can point an item at different ones if you keep separate accounts per product range.
The table lists Code, Item, Type, On hand, Average cost, Stock value and Selling price. Items you no longer sell can be deactivated rather than deleted, so their history survives; tick Show inactive items to see them again.
Opening stock
If you already have goods on the shelf the day you start, capture the opening quantity, what it cost you and an as at date when you create the item.
Missed it? The item row has an Opening stock button for as long as it has never held any. Use that rather than an adjustment: opening stock posts to Retained Earnings, because goods you already owned are not a cost of this month, while an adjustment posts to Stock adjustments — an expense — and understates the month's profit by the value of stock you bought before you started.
360books posts that value straight to Inventory, against Retained Earnings — because stock you already owned isn't a cost of this month. It's an opening balance, so it belongs in equity like any other. Your balance sheet is right from day one and your profit for the month isn't distorted.
Use what the stock actually cost you, not what you'll sell it for.
Buying stock
Add a bill as usual and on the line pick the item instead of typing a description. On a bill the picker fills in the description and points the line at your Inventory account — you still type the quantity and what you paid, because that's what sets the cost.
When you approve the bill, that line debits Inventory, not an expense account, and the quantity and value go onto the item. Nothing hits your Profit & Loss yet.
Ordering from a supplier first? Raise a purchase order, then receive it when the goods land — that builds the draft bill for you. See Orders, deliveries & credit control.
Supplier invoices match themselves to your items
Capture a supplier bill by PDF or photo and 360books doesn't just read the amounts — it works out which of your items each captured line is. Suppliers use their own wording, their own abbreviations and their own pack sizes, so the same product almost never reads the same on their invoice as it does in your item list. Matching forty lines by hand is how stock capture dies.
It tries the cheap, certain things first, in order:
- The item code — the line is the code, or starts with it ("WID-100 Blue widget").
- The item name, exactly.
- Close word matches — the same words in a different order, or with the supplier's extra words around them.
Only the lines that survive all three go to the AI, and they go as one batch rather than one call each. For a regular supplier whose wording you already recognise, that usually means no AI is used at all. It also only ever looks at your active items.
It refuses to guess. If a line says "Blue widget" and you stock both a 100mm and a 200mm blue widget, it matches neither. A close-but-wrong match is worse than no match: it would silently move the wrong item's stock and misstate your cost of sales, and nobody would notice until the year-end count. So when two items are too close to call, it leaves the line for you.
Every match is a suggestion you confirm, never a decision. Check the lines before you save the bill, and remember nothing posts until you approve it.
How the cost is worked out
360books uses moving weighted average. Buy 10 units at R100, then 10 more at R150, and you hold 20 units worth R2,500 — an average of R125 each. Sell one and the cost of that sale is R125, not R100 and not R150. Every new purchase restates the average.
IFRS and SARS both accept FIFO or weighted average; LIFO is not permitted in South Africa. Weighted average is the easier one to keep honest, because it doesn't ask you to remember which physical box came from which delivery.
Selling stock
On an invoice line, pick the item from the dropdown. It fills in the description, price and VAT rate — you just set the quantity. (The Item column only appears once you have at least one active item.)
When you issue the invoice, 360books relieves the stock and posts the cost to Cost of Sales at the current average, alongside the usual revenue and VAT entries. The cost actually posted is stored on the line, so a later void reverses exactly that figure rather than whatever the average has since become.
Quotes never move stock. A quote isn't a sale — it may never be accepted — so nothing is reserved or relieved. But the quote does remember which item you picked: when you convert a quote to an invoice, the items come across with it, and issuing that invoice relieves the stock and posts the cost exactly as if you'd typed it fresh. Nothing to re-pick.
Selling stock you haven't captured yet is refused by default. If an invoice line is for more of an item than you hold, issuing it is blocked and 360books names the item and the shortfall. The reason is that a sale out of empty stock costs nothing — there is no average to charge against — so it posts revenue with no cost of sales. Your gross profit is overstated by the whole cost of the goods, permanently, and when the supplier's invoice finally arrives it lands as cost in a later month against no revenue. Both months are wrong and nothing reconciles them, because the trial balance still balances either way.
The fix is usually to capture the supplier's bill or run a stock count first — a minute's work that keeps the month right.
If you genuinely invoice before the bill arrives, turn on Settings → Stock → "Allow selling stock you don't have". Then the invoice goes through and the quantity goes negative: if there was nothing on hand the sale costs nothing, and if there was some but not enough it takes all the value that was left. The next purchase restates the average. Month-End Autopilot lists those sales under "stock line(s) sold at no cost" so you can see what the shortcut cost you before you close the month.
Customer returns
On a credit note, pick the item and leave Back in stock ticked (it ticks itself when you choose a stock item). The goods come back in at the cost they left at, read off the original invoice — not at today's average.
That matters more than it sounds. If the average has moved since the sale, bringing a return back at today's figure would invent profit (or a loss) that never happened. So link the credit note to the original invoice. If it isn't linked, 360books has nothing to read the old cost off and falls back to the item's current average.
Untick Back in stock when nothing physically comes back: a price correction, an agreed discount after the fact, or a goodwill credit. The customer is credited, the VAT is reversed, but no stock moves.
Adjustments and stock takes
Start with a printed count sheet. You can't count stock off a screen, so there are two download buttons at the top of Items & stock:
- Count sheet — every stock item on your letterhead with a blank line to write the count on, and a place to sign at the bottom. This is a blind count: what the books expect is deliberately left off the page.
- With expected — the same sheet with the expected quantity printed next to each item.
Use the blind one. If the expected figure is printed next to the box, people write that figure down — they're not being dishonest, it's just what happens — and the count finds nothing. A blind count is the only kind that reliably tells you something you didn't already know. The sheet says as much on it, so whoever does the counting understands why the column is empty.
Then capture what was counted:
Click Adjust on an item when the shelf and the system disagree. What are you doing? offers two ways:
- I counted the stock — enter the counted quantity and 360books works out the difference. This is your stock take.
- Add or remove a quantity — enter the change, plus or minus, for breakages, samples or goods used internally.
- Write down the value — the stock is still here — the goods haven't moved, they're just worth less than you paid. See below.
Removing stock moves its value out of Inventory into Stock adjustments — a real expense, and where shrinkage, breakage and theft belong. Adding stock asks you for the value of what you're adding, because the system has no way to know what it cost.
Always pick a reason. It isn't decoration. The reason decides which account the loss lands in, and two of them — taken for own use and donated — raise a VAT question the others don't (see below). It also means your reports can separate a security problem from a buying problem, which one combined number never can.
Adjustments are never edits. Every correction is a new movement, so the history stays truthful.
Stock you can't sell: three different things
These look the same and they aren't, and getting them apart is what keeps your books defensible.
A write-off. The goods are gone — scrapped, expired, destroyed, stolen. Remove the quantity. The cost moves to Stock adjustments (5090). This is a fact.
Shrinkage. A count came up short and nobody knows why. Same posting, but pick Counted short so it reads as what it is: a control problem, not a decision. Rising shrinkage means something about how you store or record stock needs attention.
A write-down. The goods are still on your shelf and still yours — they're simply worth less than you paid. The superseded model, the roll of cable nobody has asked for in two years, anything you'd now have to discount below cost to move.
That last one is not a write-off, and treating it as one would be wrong twice over: you'd be removing stock you actually still have, and your count would stop matching the shelf. Choose Write down the value, enter the amount, and the quantity stays exactly where it is while the carrying value drops. It posts to Inventory write-down (5091) — deliberately a different account from Stock adjustments, because a write-down is your judgement about what goods are now worth, while scrapping is an event that happened. Your accountant and your auditor will want to look at those separately.
This is required, not optional: IFRS measures stock at the lower of what it cost and what you can actually get for it. Carrying dead stock at full cost overstates your assets and your profit at the same time. SARS allows the deduction too — section 22(1)(a) permits a just and reasonable reduction for stock that's obsolete or damaged — but you have to be able to show what you reduced and why, which is exactly what the reason and the note are for.
And if the value recovers — the model becomes collectable, the supplier discontinues the replacement — write it back up. Choose Add or remove a quantity with a zero change isn't it; instead add the value back with the reason Write-down reversed. IFRS requires the reversal, and leaving it written down understates your assets.
Your month-end checks list every write-down taken in the month, because a judgement should be seen and agreed before you close.
When goods leave without being sold: the VAT catch
Worth knowing before it costs you. If you took stock for your own or private use, that's a deemed supply under section 18(1) of the VAT Act, and output VAT is due on the open market value — even though no customer paid you anything. Donated stock depends entirely on who received it.
Goods that were destroyed, expired or stolen are not a supply, so no output VAT arises and the input VAT you originally claimed generally stands.
360books can't decide which applies to you, so it doesn't pretend to. Pick Taken for own use or Donated and it flags the movement, warns you on the spot, and lists it in your month-end checks under "Stock left the business without being sold — check the VAT". Take that list to your accountant before you file the VAT201.
Voiding something with stock on it
- Void an invoice and the stock goes back on the shelf at the cost it left at, and the cost of sales is reversed by exactly the amount that was posted.
- Void a bill or a credit note and 360books will refuse if that stock has already been sold on. It can't unbuy goods that have left the building without corrupting your valuation. Raise a vendor credit note (for a supplier) or a new invoice (for a customer) instead — the app tells you which.
Movement history
Click History on an item for its movement history — every movement in date order, labelled Opening stock, Bought in, Sold, Adjustment, Customer return or Returned to supplier, with the quantity, the value, the running quantity on hand after it, and any note. When someone asks "why does it say we have 7?", the answer is on that screen. (Very busy items show the most recent 300 movements.)
Valuation and low stock
Two figures sit at the top of the Items & stock page:
- Stock on hand · balance-sheet value — the total value of everything you hold. This is the Inventory figure carried on your balance sheet. Every stock movement posts its matching journal entry, so the two track each other — and the month-end close checks that they still agree, because a manual journal straight to the Inventory account can pull them apart.
- Running low — a count of items at or below the level you set in Tell me when stock drops to. Those items also carry a Low stock pill in the list, so you reorder before you run out.
Per-item quantity, average cost and stock value are columns in the list itself.
Dead & slow-moving stock
This is the report nobody asks for and everybody needs. It shows what you're holding that isn't selling — every stock item you still have on the shelf that hasn't sold within a window you choose (90 days by default), ranked by the cash tied up in it, with a total at the top.
Items that have never sold are in the list, not hidden at the bottom. They're usually the worst offenders — bought once, believed in, never moved.
Here's why it matters, and it's the whole point of the report: stock is an asset, so slow stock never shows up as a problem on your Profit & Loss. A P&L only ever sees goods that sold. R180,000 of stock that hasn't moved in a year looks exactly as healthy on your accounts as R180,000 of stock that turns over every month. It sits on the balance sheet quietly being worth something, while the cash it came from is long gone.
The only way it ever reaches your P&L is as a write-down, years later, when you finally admit it isn't going to sell. Look at this report every few months and act while the goods are still worth something — discount them, bundle them, return them to the supplier, or just stop reordering.
What it doesn't do
Worth knowing before you plan around it. There is no support for:
- Multiple warehouses or locations — one stock figure per item.
- Bill of materials or manufacturing — you can't build one item out of others.
- Serial or batch numbers — no per-unit or per-batch tracing, and no expiry dates.
- Landed costs — freight, duty and clearing aren't spread across the goods; capture them as ordinary expenses.
If your business depends on any of those, use a dedicated inventory system alongside 360books.