FIFO COGS Calculator (Excel XLSX)

I first came across this problem from an Upwork job query many years ago. I was stumped on it for quite a long time and then one day tried to really think of an outside-the-box solution that would allow the FIFO method to be implemented in Excel so that the calculations for the COGS of inventory could be automatically calculated.

This financial calculator is designed to calculate the Cost of Goods Sold (COGS) value for units sold based on using the FIFO Accounting methodology. FIFO means first in, first out and it can be complicated and tedious to figure out how to value your COGS when purchases happen of a given unit type at different prices over time.

This template comes with a single SKU and up to 5 SKU calculators and allows for up to 100 purchases / 100 sales to happen. A bigger file version is available upon request for up to ~400 purchases / sales, but the Excel file is larger.

Normally, an Accountant would have to go through and figure out how many units that were sold should be priced at purchase price batch 1 and then if more are sold than that, how many are priced at purchase price 2, and so on until the entire units sold for a given batch is fully priced at the proper cost.

In this template, all the user has to do is enter historical purchases (quantity / price) in the order the purchases happened (oldest at the top) and then historical sales and the date of sale (oldest at the top).

The output is the average cost per unit of sold items in a given batch and the total COGS per batch sold and total COGS per month. This template is built to expand easily. More SKUs can be added by making copies of the existing tabs and adjusting the references accordingly.