How repair costs reach the ledger
Every part, hour of labour, freight leg and vendor fee on a repair is a cost line, and every consumed cost line posts to your books on its own — there's no separate "repair accounting" step to run. This page explains which account each line lands in, what happens when you refurbish a piece you already own, and what a locked accounting period does to a repair's costs.
Which account a cost hits
Each cost line is billed to one of four buckets — Warranty, Supplier, Goodwill or Customer — chosen when the line is added on the repair's Costs & billing tab. The bucket decides the expense account the line debits:
A Supplier cost posts to the same expense account as Warranty — it isn't moved out until a supplier recovery claim actually settles. If you're accruing a reserve (see below), Warranty and Supplier costs post to Warranty reserve instead of Warranty expense, drawing the reserve down instead of hitting expense directly.
What's on the other side of the entry depends on the kind of cost:
| Cost | Debits | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| A part fitted, or a recycled part put back on | The bill-to's expense account | Inventory for that part |
| A part removed and salvaged from a piece you own | Inventory for the salvaged part | Inventory for the repaired unit |
| Labour | The bill-to's expense account | Direct Labor Applied |
| Freight, a vendor fee, or another cost | The bill-to's expense account | Accrued Purchases |
Freight and vendor fees post to Accrued Purchases rather than a dedicated shipping accrual — the carrier's or vendor's own bill later clears it, the same way any other supplier bill does. A cost is posted on the day its stock actually moved (for a part), or the day it was recorded otherwise, so the ledger and your inventory agree on dates.
The cost row stays the source of its own entry: changing a line's bill-to reclasses the posting to the new account, deleting a line reverses what it posted, and un-consuming a planned part (putting it back to Planned) withdraws its entry the same way. A part that's only Planned — added to the repair but not yet used — never posts anything.
The five accounts repair postings use
Repair postings touch five accounts in total: Warranty expense, Warranty reserve, Goodwill repair expense, Repair revenue and Repair cost of sales. Until a role is mapped, its costs post to the product's ordinary cost of goods sold account instead, and repair revenue posts to your regular sales account — so nothing is lost. The Warranty cost report can't reconcile to the GL at all while both Warranty expense and Warranty reserve are unmapped, and the Repairs dashboard's Finish setting up repairs banner names each role that's still unmapped and where its costs go meanwhile. Map them under Accounting → Settings → Nominal Code Mappings; see Set the accounting options for where that mapping banner lives on the repair settings page, and Accounting settings at a glance for how Nominal Code Mappings works in general.
Refurbishing a piece you own
When you resolve a unit as Refurbished to stock, you're turning a piece you already own into a (possibly different) sellable SKU — plating, restoring or combining it into another product. Settings → Repairs & Warranty → General's Accounting card decides how that's costed:
- Add to the piece's cost (the default) — every part, labour and vendor cost spent refurbishing it raises the new SKU's inventory value instead of hitting expense. SKU.io routes the total through Work In Process first: it debits WIP for the full cost, credits each cost's own expense or inventory account (the same accounts above — capitalising only redirects where the cost ends up, it doesn't change how each line was originally posted), then debits the output SKU's inventory for that value and closes WIP back out.
- Expense them — the unit keeps its original cost; parts and labour hit their normal expense accounts as they're incurred, same as any other repair cost.
Either way, if the value you'd be putting into the output SKU comes out higher than it could actually sell for, SKU.io won't silently inflate your inventory: it debits cost of goods sold for the excess over that net realisable value and expenses only that amount, whichever costing mode you chose. When the piece you refurbished and the SKU it becomes share the same inventory account, the two sides of that entry net to one line instead of two that would otherwise cancel out for nothing.
Once a unit resolves as Refurbished to stock, its line on the Costs & billing tab shows a Refurbish cost breakdown — Unit cost, Parts, Labour, Vendor, Total, Can sell for (NRV), and Costing (Capitalised or Expensed) — so you can see exactly what went into the new SKU's value without reopening every cost line. If the write-down above applied, a banner on that breakdown says so: "This unit was valued [amount] above what it can sell for; the excess was expensed."
Repair costs in a locked accounting period
A repair cost follows the same lock as everything else in your books: a new cost dated on or before the lock is booked on the first open day instead, with its intended date kept on the record, and a cost that already posted inside a locked period is frozen — SKU.io won't let you edit it, un-consume it, re-bill it or delete it. See What closing does to your books for how that lock works and where you see a displaced entry.
One case is specific to repairs: if a supplier's bill for a dispatched unit arrives after that unit's estimated cost has already fallen inside a locked period, SKU.io posts the difference as a fresh, current-dated cost rather than touching the frozen original.
Next steps
- Run the warranty reserve and accrual — if you accrue a reserve instead of expensing warranty costs as incurred.
- Read repair dashboards and reports — the Warranty cost report reconciles this posting against your actual GL balance.
- Set the accounting options — turn on reserve accounting or change the refurbish costing mode.
- Review the ledger — find any of these entries and read its debits and credits.
- Chart of accounts reference — the default accounts, including Direct Labor Applied and Accrued Purchases.