While running your business you may find it necessary from time to time to remove an item from your inventory for store-use. In order to keep your stock quantities accurate and to properly account for the removal of the item from inventory, it is best to create a vendor return for the item. Doing so allows you to remove the item without affecting your sales figures and creates a legitimate paper trail for tracking purposes.

To remove an item from inventory for store use:

1. Create a vendor in your account to represent your business. This is the "vendor" you'll be returning the item to.
2. Create a vendor return reason for "store use" and apply it to the vendor returns you create for this reason. This allows you to properly track why the item is being removed.
3. Create a vendor return to the vendor created in Step 1.
4. Add the item in question to the vendor return.
5. Apply the vendor return reason created in Step 2 to the item in the vendor return.
6. Optionally, set the cost of the item being returned to $0.00.
7. Complete the vendor return.

Setting the cost of the item to $0.00 in Step 6 allows you to account for the cost of the item being removed from inventory. Depending on how you prefer to do your accounting, you can leave the item's cost at the default cost and account for this expense manually in your accounting software.