GL accounts confusion

[lindabrewer]

I just started working for a caterer. In the past I see that the previous employee entered purchases as Cost of Sales sometimes and Food Expense sometimes.

The purchases of food are always for catered events - should I always post to Cost of Sales? I want to clean the books up for 2005 - entries are scattered everywhere.

[dringstrom]

Typically one would have a Food Expense account that is classified as a Cost of Goods Sold type of account, as opposed to an Expense account. You can double-check the settings in Maintain, Chart of Accounts and pull up the accounts in questions. If you have an account labeled Cost of Goods Sold that is classified as Cost of Goods Sold, then that's pretty redundant and could be renamed to an account like I described above.