Business owners and managers have to be talented jugglers. You wear many hats during the day, trying to keep one eye on daily operations and the other on business growth opportunities. You can’t afford to waste time wondering where you stand, especially regarding wholesale orders. Order entry software puts everything right at your fingertips.
Order entry software boosts the power of QuickBooks.
The most effective software integrates seamlessly with your QuickBooks system. The system captures and applies customer-specific pricing, inventory, and shipping data automatically, so there’s never a need for redundant data entry. This enables you to use QuickBooks not only to manage your financials but as a communication tool that connects sales, customer service, accounting, and shipping. You can even send your shopping cart orders automatically to QuickBooks and integrate with your shipping software or 3PL warehouse.
Mistakes. Everyone makes them, right? Unfortunately, when you're running a business, a few innocent little mistakes can quickly add up to a serious expense. The wrong order gets shipped and you have to pay to replace it. Or an order gets delayed and arrives late and you have to cut the customer a break to keep them happy. These things happen.
If you're like most business owners, you understand that your employees, your reps, and even your customers are going to make mistakes, but you'd also like to find a way to reduce these costly errors.
You may have some systems and processes that you've outgrown, but just haven't had the time or resources to address. If you're like a lot of fast-growing businesses, your order fulfillment process could be very high on that list.
When you first opened your doors, you may have been able to take orders, grab the inventory, and box up the product yourself. Today, you have more incoming orders than you and your team can handle. If you're still using the same process that you did back when you were a one-person operation, you may have a serious problem.
You probably pride yourself on excellent customer service. However, it's tough to manage your customer service when you utilize multi-line sales reps. Often, the sales rep becomes the face of your company to the customer. For all the benefits that can be gained with multi-line reps, you run the risk that the rep may make mistakes that undermine your customer service standards.
Independent sales reps can be a big boost to SMB’s who are manufacturers, importers, and sell wholesale. They can expand your reach and get the word out to new customers. These reps can be your eyes and ears in the field, helping to keep you informed of customer opinions and competitor trends. They bring in the orders and act as a first line of defense for customer service issues. New reps can also bring in an instant customer base.
But do your outside sales reps drive you crazy? Managing independent multi-line reps has been compared to herding cats... it is very challenging to get them all moving in the same direction and they usually have a mind of their own. Offering your reps an online Rep Portal can make your sales team more productive, more independent, and can make your company stand out from the other lines they represent. A good online ordering system will also integrate with QuickBooks so the orders that your reps place will become sales orders without any data entry by your customer service staff.
An efficient order management process in QuickBooks will make your life easier. If you are a wholesaler, manufacturer, importer, or distributor you can save time and money by developing a process that flows with QuickBooks instead of working against it. This means using sales orders. QuickBooks wants you to use sales orders for your wholesale customers (just click Home in QB and you’ll see the QuickBooks sales process begins with a sales order).
Sales orders are a commitment to ship something in the future, even if the future is the same day the order comes in. An invoice is a request for money after the order has been shipped. You can convert a sales order into an invoice with just a few clicks. The best flow for most wholesale businesses is to create the sales order, print a pick list and a packing slip for your shipping department (and/or a work order if you are a manufacturer), and then create the invoice after the order is fulfilled. If there are backorders on the sales order these items will automatically stay open after you invoice the items that did ship.
Many companies who use Quickbooks and sell wholesale, also sell to individual consumers by using a shopping cart. However, the order fulfillment and billing processes for these two types of customers can be very different. eCommerce systems used for selling to wholesale customers need to accommodate the different requirements of selling B2C vs B2B. There are also differences in how these two types of customers should be set up in QuickBooks that will help in reporting and order management.
One of the great things about QuickBooks is that there are multiple versions to meet any need. Whether you're a startup or established, whether you sell products or services, there's a version of QuickBooks for you.
