What is the best way to track supplies you don’t sell?

[BlankMason]

I am trying to find the best way to keep track of supplies we order from uline or Amazon for items like, paper towel, light bulbs etc. what is the best way to track these items in square while using purchase orders as well

[Donnie-M]

@BlankMason Generally these types of items would be inventoried but are not considered Cost of Goods Sold.  If you want to track them, I would enter them in as 0.00 items with an inventory count and the cost like you would any other item but a 0.00 price.  Then you can do inventory weekly or monthly and just ring them in on a transaction what you have used and cash it out. 0.00 of course but the items will come out of inventory and you can set up your ordering that way if I am understanding the question.  The cost will still be there for your reporting since no income is derived from the items.

In restaurants we used to do something similar where we factored for every 100 items sold you used x number of straws, packs of ketchup, napkins, etc. based on historical usage vs. sales.  This gave us a "target" paper cost to see if we were over using or underusing items and to know what type of par level we need to maintain in the stores.