Читать книгу Cost Accounting For Dummies - Kenneth W. Boyd - Страница 42

A retailer doesn’t make a product. Instead, it buys inventory and sells it to customers. The largest cost for most retailers is inventory. (See Chapter 9 for more on inventory.) Retailers don’t create work-in-process or finished goods. Those terms apply only to manufacturers.

Retailers incur ordering costs to order inventory and carrying costs to store inventory. Check out Chapter 18 for the details. The risk for a retailer is carrying too much inventory — or running out of inventory when a customer wants to buy more product.

This is a delicate balance. The more inventory you own, the more cash you spend (and that gives you less cash to use for other things). You don’t recover the cash until the customer pays for the product. Likewise, if you run out of inventory, and there’s more demand for your product, you lose sales.