QuickBooks Online Users Piece Together a Write-Off Path for Promotional Samples
QuickBooks Online has no single button for writing off sample inventory, so users clear it with an invoice, a journal entry, and a payment.
A recurring question in QuickBooks Online circles has a deceptively simple surface: you gave inventory away as free samples, and now the books need to reflect that. The software offers no dedicated write-off control for it. The accepted community answer instead chains an invoice, a journal entry, and a customer payment into one working solution.
The symptoms users run into
Users notice it in small ways. Quantities on hand stay higher than the shelf reflects. The profit and loss statement shows nothing for giveaways, so margins drift optimistic. A physical count then disagrees with the software, and someone has to explain the gap. The question tends to come from businesses that hand out testers or demo units.
Why is a free sample hard to book?
Inventory tracking in QuickBooks Online is available only on the Plus plan. Once it is active, every unit you hand out still counts as stock on hand. The item leaves the shelf, but no customer pays for it, and its cost needs a sensible home.
The accepted answer treats samples as advertising. The cost of the goods, not a sale price, becomes a promotional expense. The complication is mechanical: tracked quantities drop only through sales transactions. So you create a sale, then reverse its income effects line by line. Booking a plain invoice and leaving it alone would inflate income, because the sample was never truly sold.
The expense account comes first
Open Settings and head to the Chart of accounts. Create a new account with an Expense type and the Advertising/Promotional detail type. Name it something that flags the goods as samples not intended for sale, then save and close. This account is where the cost of every giveaway will settle.
An invoice draws the items out of stock
Next, create an invoice for the sampled items and complete the fields as usual. Saving the invoice is what lowers the quantity on hand. Nobody expects money from it; the document exists to move the count. Use the description or memo field to state the purpose plainly, so the paper trail explains itself later. Keep the invoice details handy, because its date anchors every step that follows.
The journal entry that squares the books
The invoice fixed the count but also booked income and cost of goods sold. To measure both, open the Profit and Loss report under Standard reports. Set the date to the invoice date, choose accrual as the accounting method, and run it. Accrual matters here; a cash basis view can hide the invoice entirely. The report gives you the income figure and the cost figure you now need to move.
From there, build a journal entry dated that same day. Debit Sales of Product Income for the amount being written off, with a memo noting the reversal. Credit Cost of Goods Sold for what the goods actually cost. Credit Accounts Receivable for the same amount as the income reversal, and attach the customer name to that line.
Finally, debit the promotional samples account; the amount fills itself in once the lines balance. The promotional expense ends up carrying the cost of the goods, which is the point of the exercise.
Clearing the invoice with a payment
One loose end remains. Open Receive payment and select the customer. The open invoice should appear; check the box beside it and save. If nothing is listed, cancel out, because the journal entry has already done the work. The result is a clean ledger: the customer owes nothing, the sample cost sits in promotional expense, and the income never existed.
The cautions attached to the answer
Three warnings travel with the solution. Keep the same date on every transaction in the chain, or your reports will wobble between periods. Remember that inventory tracking requires the Plus plan, so lower tiers need another approach entirely. The answer itself also advises looping in an accountant whenever the amount would noticeably shift gross sales.
A workaround standing in for a feature
Nothing here is exotic. Every piece is a standard QuickBooks Online transaction used in an ordinary way. What users are responding to is the absence of a single native path for giveaways, and the accepted answer fills that gap with bookkeeping most small businesses can follow. It asks you to get comfortable with debits and credits. Each step is short, though, and the memo fields keep the story readable months later. For now, the community treats this sequence as the settled route.