The COGS report answers two questions your accountant asks every period: what did the goods you sold actually cost, and what is the inventory you still hold worth? Both come from your real receipt costs - the landed cost each delivery arrived at - not a static per-product cost field.
Run it
Go to Reports, pick COGS, and set a date range. Then choose the Method your books use:
FIFO - sales consume your oldest stock first, at the cost that stock arrived for. This is how QuickBooks Online costs inventory.
Weighted average - every receipt re-blends into a moving average cost, and sales consume at that average. This is how QuickBooks Desktop costs inventory.
Match the method to your accounting system and the two will reconcile. Switching the select recomputes the whole report - you can look at both, your books just use one.
Reading the columns
Units sold / Restocked - units sold in the window, and the subset of refunded units that were actually restocked.
COGS - the cost booked for the units sold.
Reversals - cost credited back for restocked refunds. A refund without a restock keeps its cost booked - the goods are gone, so their cost stays sold.
Net COGS - COGS minus reversals; the number for your books.
Avg / unit - net COGS per unit sold, handy for spot-checking.
Ending units / Ending value - what is left at the end of the window, valued under the same method. This is your period-end inventory valuation.
Where the numbers come from
Costing starts from a one-time opening snapshot: the day Stockroom began tracking costs for your store, everything on hand was valued at its cost of record. From that day forward, every receipt adds stock at the landed cost it actually arrived for - unit cost plus its share of freight and other charges. The more of your purchasing flows through Stockroom, the closer this report gets to accounting-grade.
The footnotes are the honesty
The report never quietly guesses. Anything that could not be costed cleanly is counted and disclosed under the total:
Provisional figures - the most recent days are marked provisional until the nightly sales recompute settles them (late refunds and edits can still land).
Units sold past all cost layers - you sold more than Stockroom has receipted; those units used the nearest known cost.
Units with no cost on file - booked at zero rather than invented.
Foreign-currency costs - items whose costs are in another currency are excluded until currency conversion ships, and the count tells you how many.
Stock moved outside Stockroom - units that changed through other apps or manual edits are flagged as unaccounted rather than silently costed.
Export and schedule it
Like every report, Export CSV downloads exactly what you see, and Schedule can email it (or post it to Slack) on a cadence - monthly on the 1st is the natural fit for period-end books.