Bookkeeping for City of Industry businesses

Short answer: A bookkeeper for City of Industry businesses keeps inventory, landed cost, freight and intercompany activity right for importers, distributors and manufacturers. The city charges no business license fee or license tax, but every business located there needs a city business license. The heavy lifting is in the books: purchase deposits, duties and stock that ties to the warehouse.

A city built for industry

City of Industry was incorporated in 1957 to promote industrial development, and it still looks the part. The 2020 Census counted only 264 residents, while the Industry Business Council says it represents more than 3,000 businesses in manufacturing, wholesale and distribution. The city describes itself as sitting at the core of a 40 mile radius that takes in Los Angeles, Orange County and the Inland Empire, and it points businesses to a Foreign Trade Zone.

In practice, that means warehouses, distribution centers, import and export companies, wholesalers, and plants that make or assemble products. Many are owned by families or small groups who run several related companies.

What books in Industry usually need

• Inventory by item, tied each month to the warehouse or inventory system.
• Landed cost: product cost plus ocean or air freight, duties, customs broker fees and drayage.
• Deposits paid to overseas factories held as prepaid inventory until goods arrive.
• Freight in and freight out kept apart, so margin per order is honest.
• Separate books for the operating company, the import entity and the company that owns the building, with intercompany balances that agree.
• Payments to suppliers in other currencies recorded at the right rate.

What City of Industry owners ask us for

• Import/export bookkeeping: Importers here pay overseas factories weeks before a container lands. Holding those deposits as prepaid inventory and adding duties, broker fees and drayage gives a real landed cost per unit.
• Warehouse and logistics bookkeeping: Distribution centers and wholesalers in Industry need the inventory in the books to match the warehouse system. A monthly roll forward catches gaps before they grow into a year-end surprise.
• Monthly bookkeeping: Families here often run an operating company, an import entity and a building company side by side. A monthly close for each file keeps the amounts they owe each other in agreement.

The City of Industry business license

The city requires every business located within city limits to hold a City of Industry Business License, also called a Use Permit. There are no license fees or renewal fees, and the city states it has no business license tax. Licenses do not renew each year, but a new one is needed when the owner or business name changes, when you move to a new address, or when you open another location in the city. Applications go to the city's Planning Department by email.

Contractors based elsewhere who only come in to provide services do not need a city license, according to the city. No city tax does not mean no paperwork, though. State seller's permits, sales and use tax, payroll filings and federal income tax all still depend on clean books.

Confirm license requirements with the City of Industry Planning Department, and ask your CPA or customs broker about sales tax, use tax and Foreign Trade Zone questions.

A typical cleanup: the importer whose margins swung every month

An importer of home goods wires a deposit to its factory when it places an order, and the balance when the container ships. Both wires were booked as cost of goods on the day they went out. Duties, customs broker fees and trucking from the port all landed in one shipping account. Goods arrived weeks or months after payment, so some months showed huge costs with no matching sales and other months looked wildly profitable. Inventory on the balance sheet had not changed in two years.

We moved factory deposits into prepaid inventory and released them when each container was received. Duties, broker fees and drayage were added to the cost of the goods in that container, giving a landed cost per unit. A month end inventory roll forward now ties the books to the warehouse system, and cost of goods follows actual sales. The owners finally saw which product lines earn their keep, and their CPA got an inventory figure worth signing off on.

How the work runs

1. Scope A short call on your entities, inventory system, freight partners and what is behind.
2. Connect Banks, cards and inventory or ERP reports feed into your books in QuickBooks, Xero and more, one file per entity.
3. Rebuild Past months are corrected container by container, with intercompany balances matched.
4. Monthly close Reconciled statements, an inventory roll forward and gross margin by product line or customer.

Bookkeeping services in City of Industry

• Bookkeeping cleanupWhen the books exist but nobody trusts them, cleanup finds what went wrong and fixes it at the source.
• Catch-up bookkeepingMonths behind, or a full year, the missing months get entered and reconciled from your statements.
• Emergency bookkeepingA deadline that will not move and books that are not ready. Here is how the work gets ordered.
• Monthly bookkeepingEvery month categorized, reconciled and closed, so the numbers you look at are numbers you can trust.
• QuickBooks cleanupA QuickBooks file that no longer matches the bank, fixed account by account and month by month.
• QuickBooks bookkeepingQuickBooks Online kept the way it was meant to be used, so the reports it gives you are right.

City of Industry in detail

• Import/export in City of IndustryNo city license tax to figure, so the effort goes where Industry importers need it: containers, duty timing and related companies.

Nearby in San Gabriel Valley

• Pasadena
• Alhambra
• Arcadia
• El Monte
• West Covina
• Diamond Bar
• Pomona

Questions