Updating Quickbooks Chart of Accounts

[jeffw]

I have been working on some software to automate our monthly reporting for TTB and handle the accounting of our production.  Looking through the developer documentation providing by Quickbooks on how to interact with their online accounting API has me to wondering how people move costs through their chart of accounts?  Personally, I have always used journal entries for this function.  For instance, a filled barrel of bourbon will debit empty new barrels, corn, rye, wheat, malt, yeast, enzymes, etc, and credit Work in Process/Filled Barrels of bourbon, but all done via journal entries.  I always figured this was the main way to do it and I have been doing this for years, but after reading some of the developer documentation, I see that journal entries are discouraged for extensive use.  I use the Quickbooks Simple Start, and never saw a better way to do this, but wondered what everyone else was using?  Perhaps most people are using a higher tier of Quickbooks that has better functionality for this?  Love to know how people are moving money through their chart of accounts and what you think would be the most useful way update Quickbooks in the scenario that we commercialize our record keeping software.

Cheers,

Jeff