Stock valuation and ledger posting

See what your stock is worth on any date, how it moved in a period, and keep your books in step with every sale, purchase and count.

Items & Stock can value your stock on any date and post every stock movement to your books, so the cost of what you sell and the value of what you hold always match your accounts.

Before you start: you need permission to view stock to see the reports. To switch ledger posting on, change its accounts or book a difference, you also need permission to manage Items & Stock and to post to the books in Accounting.

Switch on ledger posting

New workspaces that set up Items & Stock have ledger posting on from the first day. If you set up Items & Stock earlier, you choose:

  1. Open Items & Stock and go to Settings.
  2. In the Ledger posting card, turn on Post stock moves to the ledger.
  3. Check the five accounts: Inventory, Cost of goods sold, Purchases, Inventory adjustments and Opening stock. Leave any of them on Match or create automatically and Axis picks a matching account from your chart, or creates a standard one.
  4. Select Save ledger posting.

Only stock moves from now on are posted. To bring the stock you already have into your books, see "Bring existing stock into your books" below.

What gets posted

Every stock move becomes one journal entry, valued at the item's average cost at that moment:

  • Sale (at the counter or on an invoice): Cost of goods sold goes up, Inventory goes down. A return, credit note or cancelled invoice posts the reverse.
  • Purchase (a purchase bill, or goods received against a purchase order): the value moves from Purchases into Inventory. Your purchase bill still posts to Purchases as before, so the goods are counted once, in Inventory.
  • Receive: the same as a purchase. Turn on Opening stock when you receive stock you already had when you started; it posts against Opening Balance Equity instead.
  • Count & adjust: the difference goes to Inventory adjustments.
  • Transfer between locations: nothing is posted, because the stock stays in the same Inventory account.

Manual moves post straight away. Counter sales and invoices post within about a minute.

See your stock value

  1. Go to Valuation.
  2. Pick the date in As of and, if you want one warehouse or store, a Location.
  3. Read the value per item and location, the average cost, and the Total.
  4. Select CSV or Excel to download the report.

If you can read the books, the report also shows the balance of your Inventory account and the Difference (stock − books), with the usual reasons when they don't match.

Bring existing stock into your books

  1. Go to Valuation with today's date and All locations.
  2. If there is a difference and no moves are waiting to post, select Book the difference.
  3. Confirm. Axis posts one entry, dated today, between Inventory and your opening stock account, and the difference becomes zero.

See how stock moved in a period

  1. Go to Movement summary.
  2. Pick From, To and, if you like, a Location.
  3. For each item, read the opening quantity and value, what came in, what went out, and the closing quantity and value.
  4. Select CSV or Excel to download it.

When a move can't be posted

A move is kept, never undone, when it can't be posted. For example, its date is in a locked period, or an account is missing. In Settings → Ledger posting you'll see how many moves are waiting or not posted, and why. Fix the cause, for example by choosing the missing account, then select Post waiting moves.

Good to know

  • Stock is valued at moving average cost. FIFO and other methods aren't available.
  • Every move is rounded to paise when it is posted, so the books and the report can differ by a few paise over many moves.
  • A return or a cancelled sale comes back into stock at the item's average cost on the day it returns, which can differ slightly from the cost it went out at.
  • If you buy at one price and the bill comes in at another, the difference stays in Purchases.
  • Goods received before their bill show as a credit on Purchases until the bill is entered.
  • Report days and entry dates follow India time.
  • Turning ledger posting off stops new moves from posting. Moves made while it was off show up as a difference on the Valuation report.