Inventory adjustments establish beginning inventory quantities and costs, and record subsequent adjustments for differences between the system’s on-hand quantities and the actual physical count.

If you have Accounts Payable and/or Purchase Order and Sales integrated to Inventory, inventory quantities update automatically as the items are bought and sold.

Inventory stock quantities are increased when stock items are purchased (through Accounts Payable and/or Purchase Order) and decreased when sold (through Sales). There might be times when you need to adjust the stock quantities in Inventory for other reasons—physical count discrepancies, breakage, or charitable contributions, for example. In this case, you can make an adjustment transaction to adjust your physical on-hand quantity.

You can also import stock item data directly into your database tables. See Importing and Exporting in Inventory to determine the best method for your business.

If you run Inventory as a stand-alone module, you must use adjustment transactions to process all of your additions and subtractions. In addition, if you do not have Inventory integrated to General Ledger, you must manually update your ledger each time you post inventory adjustments.