Your question is you have hundreds of units for sale and would like o know if you have to report profits by item.
Basically when you are a developer selling homes you generally keep the cost by property. (or some other very high priced item). For a business selling many products such as a hardware, of a plumbing supply selling many items you do not need to keep the information by item. Generally you will have a beginning inventory from the prior year, you will add all the inventory purchases and deduct your ending inventory. You need to be able to have an end of year inventory. Since computers have become very sophisticated and accounting programs have the ability to segregate assets by category you can separate sales and cost of sales by category. That is for management purposes only. There is a section 263A Called Uniform Capitalization Rule that requires companies with average sales for the last 3 years in excess of 25 million to capitalize direct cost as well as a share of indirect costs.
