FIFO Inventory

Lesson

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FIFO stands for first in, first out. This means that older inventory is sold first.

Imagine people lining up at store. The people at the front of the line have been there the longest. When a clerk is available, he'll go to the person at the front of the line, he'll speak to the person in the front of the line. In other words, the person that was there the longest is the first one who will get to complete his business and leave the line.

In other words, the first person that was waiting gets to be the first person to leave the line.

Question

You're managing an inventory system using the FIFO method.

You've been briefed with the following facts:

Your inventory of boats was purchased in different quantities and at different prices, as shown below:

Inventory Holdings
Inventory Purchase	Count	Price per Unit	Product Name
Purchase #1	29	$14	Boats
Purchase #2	29	$22	Boats
Purchase #3	11	$34	Boats
Purchase #4	18	$14	Boats
Purchase #5	22	$41	Boats

Right after updating your inventory records, customers bought 41 boats.

Using the FIFO method, what is the value of the remaining inventory?

Answer

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👉 Answer:

The ending inventory is worth $1,902.00.

👨‍🎓 Here are the steps to figure it out:

The first step should be to write out the current inventory.

Inventory Holdings
Inventory Purchase	Count	Price per Unit	Product Name
Purchase #1	29	$14	Boats
Purchase #2	29	$22	Boats
Purchase #3	11	$34	Boats
Purchase #4	18	$14	Boats
Purchase #5	22	$41	Boats

Now write down the number of customer sales we need to account for (41) and the quantity of items that the firm bought in the earliest inventory purchase in our table (29).
We need to account for more sales than can be covered by our most recent inventory purchase. Let's remove the entire earliest inventory purchase from our inventory table and reduce the number of sales we have to account for by the quantity of inventory we just removed (29).
41 - 29 = 12

Now our inventory table looks like this.

Inventory Holdings
Inventory Purchase	Count	Price per Unit	Product Name
Purchase #2	29	$22	Boats
Purchase #3	11	$34	Boats
Purchase #4	18	$14	Boats
Purchase #5	22	$41	Boats

Now write down the number of customer sales we need to account for (12) and the quantity of items that the firm bought in the earliest inventory purchase in our table (29).
Since the number of items we need to account for (12) is lower than the remaining items left in the most recent inventory purchase (29), we can just reduce the quantity of items in the earliest inventory purchase by (12).

Here's the final state of our inventory table:

Inventory Holdings
Inventory Purchase	Count	Price per Unit	Product Name
Purchase #2	17	$22	Boats
Purchase #3	11	$34	Boats
Purchase #4	18	$14	Boats
Purchase #5	22	$41	Boats

Sum the dollar value of each row in our inventory table.
ROW UNIT COUNT * ROW PRICE PER UNIT = ROW INVENTORY VALUE
Now we just have to do the math to arrive at our ending inventory.
ENDING INVENTORY = 17 * $22 + 11 * $34 + 18 * $14 + 22 * $41

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