QuickBooks Units of Measure: Buying in Cases, Selling in Eaches

If you searched for QuickBooks units of measure, you probably buy inventory in one unit and sell it in another. You purchase a case of 24 jars, then sell single jars. You buy resin by the drum, then consume it by the pound. QuickBooks Online has no answer for this: it does not support units-of-measure conversion on any plan. This guide explains exactly what QuickBooks Online does and does not do with units, where the common case-and-each workarounds fall apart, and how Evenbatch adds per-item unit conversions on top of QuickBooks Online so the arithmetic stops living in someone's head.

What QuickBooks Online actually supports for units of measure

The facts first, stated plainly. QuickBooks Online does not support units-of-measure conversion. There is no field on an item where you can say "1 case = 24 eaches." Units of measure is a QuickBooks Desktop feature, not a QuickBooks Online one.

QuickBooks Online Plus and Advanced do track inventory. They record quantities on hand and cost inventory using FIFO. But every item lives in a single implicit unit. If you set up "Strawberry Jam 12oz" as an item, QuickBooks Online tracks a number of that item. Whether that number means cases or eaches is entirely up to whoever typed the transaction. There is no case/each relationship anywhere in the product, so nothing stops one person from receiving in cases while another sells in eaches against the same count.

The gap matters more now than it used to. Intuit has stopped selling new subscriptions of most QuickBooks Desktop products to new US customers and retires older Desktop versions on an annual schedule. Many businesses that relied on Desktop's unit of measure feature are moving to QuickBooks Online and discovering the feature is not there. If that is you, we wrote a separate guide on moving inventory from QuickBooks Desktop to Online.

Where the case-and-each workarounds break

Most small manufacturers do not give up when they hit this wall. They improvise. The improvisations work until they don't, and they break in three predictable places.

Purchasing. The common workaround is to track everything in eaches and do the multiplication by hand. Your vendor's invoice says 10 cases; whoever enters the bill types 240 eaches. That is one mental multiplication per line, done at receiving, often while the delivery driver is waiting. One slip (a 10 typed as 100, a 24-count case treated as a 12-count) and your on-hand quantity is wrong. Worse, because QuickBooks Online costs inventory using FIFO, the bad quantity also creates a bad cost layer, and the error keeps flowing through cost of goods sold long after the typo.

Selling. The other common workaround is duplicate items: "Jam - CASE" and "Jam - EACH" as two separate items. Now the same physical stock is split across two records that never reconcile. Sell a case, and the each count doesn't move. Break a case open to fill a single-unit order, and someone has to remember to journal quantity from one item to the other. Quantity on hand becomes a number nobody trusts, which defeats the point of tracking it.

Bills of materials. If you manufacture, the problem compounds. Your recipe consumes eaches (24 jars, 24 lids, 2 pounds of fruit) while you purchase cases and drums. QuickBooks Online has no bills of materials at all, so the recipe itself already lives in a spreadsheet, and the case-to-each conversion lives in a column next to it. Every production run means someone converting units by hand before adjusting inventory. We cover the missing-BOM problem in depth in our guide to bills of materials for QuickBooks Online.

Notice what all three failure modes have in common: a human is doing arithmetic that software should own. The conversion factor never changes. A case of 24 is always 24. The only variable is whether the person doing the multiplication is tired that day.

How Evenbatch adds per-item unit conversions on top of QuickBooks

Evenbatch is web-based inventory software built for small manufacturers, roughly 1 to 10 people, who run their books on QuickBooks Online. Unit conversion is one of the core things it handles.

In Evenbatch, you define the conversion once per item: buy in one unit, sell in another. Cases to eaches, drums to pounds, rolls to feet. That single definition is then used across purchasing, BOMs, and sales. One number, entered once, applied everywhere. Nobody multiplies by 24 at receiving ever again.

Here is what the flow looks like end to end:

1. Purchase in cases. You raise a purchase order in the unit your vendor actually sells. At receiving, you capture the lot number and expiry date on the incoming stock. Evenbatch applies the conversion, so your on-hand quantity in eaches is correct without anyone doing math. (Lot capture at receiving is covered in our QuickBooks lot tracking guide.)
2. Produce in eaches. A production order explodes your bill of materials and consumes components in the units the recipe uses. Components are picked FEFO, first-expired-first-out, and the output lot carries a rolled-up per-unit cost. BOMs support 1-2 levels, scrap percentage, and versioning, so edits after transactions create a new version and history is preserved.
3. Sell in eaches. Sales orders allocate stock FEFO and ship in the selling unit. The same conversion definition governs the whole chain, so purchasing, production, and sales are always talking about the same physical stock.

One more point, because case-and-each products are very often also lot-tracked products (food, beverage, cosmetics, supplements): lot tracking is included on every Evenbatch plan. Per-lot remaining quantities, expiry dates, expiry alerts, and a one-click recall trace from lot to production runs to shipments, with CSV export of the trace. It is not an add-on you buy later.

What posts back to QuickBooks, and how

Evenbatch connects to QuickBooks Online through Intuit's official API using OAuth 2.0. You authorize the connection on Intuit's side; Evenbatch never sees your QuickBooks password.

The division of labor is simple. All the unit math happens in Evenbatch. QuickBooks receives clean accounting documents: Evenbatch pushes invoices, bills, and production journal entries, and imports your items, customers, and vendors from QuickBooks so you are not retyping your list.

The sync is designed to be inspectable rather than magical:

• A preview/shadow mode shows every change before anything is written to QuickBooks.
• A full sync log records what was sent and when.
• Held changes wait for your explicit approval. Nothing is written silently.
• Item sync is create-only, so Evenbatch never overwrites an existing QuickBooks record.

That design matters most for exactly the people reading this page. If you have been burned by hand-converted quantities corrupting your books, the last thing you want is a second system writing to QuickBooks without showing its work. With Evenbatch you can see every document before it lands.

Questions to ask any inventory tool about units of measure

Whatever tool you evaluate, unit conversion is a place where marketing pages get vague. These questions cut through it:

• Can you define the conversion once per item and have purchasing, BOMs, and sales all use the same definition?
• Does the price scale per user, or is it flat?
• Is units-of-measure support, or lot tracking, a paid add-on or a higher tier?
• Can you export all of your data anytime, in a format you can open?
• Can you preview what the tool writes to QuickBooks before it writes anything?

For the record, here are Evenbatch's answers. One conversion definition per item, used everywhere. Pricing is $49.99 per month flat, with unlimited users, every feature included, and no add-ons or per-user fees. Lot tracking and unit conversions are on every plan. You can start a 14-day free trial with no credit card required. Migration in is a free CSV import of items, BOMs, lots, and stock levels from spreadsheets or exports of other tools, and you can take a full CSV export of your own data anytime. Every QuickBooks write goes through the preview described above.

Buying in cases and selling in eaches is not an exotic requirement. It is how most small manufacturers actually operate. The software should do that multiplication, every time, the same way, and show you the result before it touches your books.

See something outdated or incorrect on this page? Email support@evenbatch.com and we will correct it within 48 hours. Last updated: July 16, 2026.