Better ordering processing makes everyone’s life better. From the people in your office, to your warehouse, to your customers – streamlined, effective order processing makes people happy.
Don’t believe me?
Think about it.
Who likes inputting orders? Who really, truly enjoys deciphering hand written orders, or inconsistent product names, or fetching faxes or taking the 10th call about the same order that day? Why spend the man hours on manually inputting orders if you don’t have to?
Order processing software isn’t as cool as buying the office pizza for lunch, but the office will appreciate it more than pizza.
Everyone loves getting a pizza for lunch, but that really just hides the pain of having to go back to spending the day inputting the same routine orders. Orders from customers who are impatient at how long it takes for the process to take place, and frustrated that with how much business they give you, you still can’t give them faster service or greater insight into how their order is proceeding.
You might have the fortunate problem of having more business than ever lately, meaning that your team is getting out later and later every day. No matter how much time they put in, there’s just too many orders to get through them and get home in time for dinner.
That’s a great problem to have, but no one likes putting in 10 hour days every day, even with free pizza.
So how do you fix it?
You standardize your order processing through software.
You’re already using QuickBooks, and if you’re getting as much out of it as you could, you’re utilizing many of the features that will enable you to easily take your ordering to the next step.
Why should your team have to input every single order? Why not have your customers input the orders they need? Why place an extra step between allowing them to easily and seamlessly buy from you?
That’s what a great ordering processing software does.
Customers order what they need, when they need it.
One of your team members reviews the order prior to fulfillment, and your fulfillment process zips along its merry way.
Instead of the bulk of someone’s day being spent on the same routine orders every day, they can devote time to problem solving, helping other customers, or playing foosball.
See? Happier people.
It’s not just for when you’re growing – order processing software is for the business comfortable where it is, too.
Customer ordering software goes from “nice to have” to “need to have” for most growing businesses, but what if you’re running a steady business that’s not rocketing upwards in growth? Should you really worry about offering online ordering to your clients? Will they really care or even use it?
Unequivocally, yes.
Imagine things from your customer’s point of view.
It’s the end of a long day, and they’re running through their inventory and figuring out what they need to order. It’s 8 pm and they really just want to be done – but instead, they’re placing orders.
Now they have to figure out how they’re going to do that - do they need to call a salesperson? Did the part numbers change? Who were they supposed to email, or fax, or call this order in to?
Instead of all of that headache, they have a different option.
They just go online.
Thanks to your online ordering system and your effective product descriptions, they can place their order at their leisure. They can take their time placing their order exactly how they want, and review it online at any time – because the entire process is synchronized online, through your website’s B2B portal.
An order comes in, Now Commerce creates the orders in QuickBooks automatically, doing the processing that your staff used to have to do. Have a sales rep order? A fulfillment order for your B2B clients? Now Commerce is the robot that does the tedious steps for you.
Compare that to placing an order with a rep, waiting for the rep to get back to the office, then input the order, get the order approved, and send an update back to the customer.
Or faxing in the order, having one of the office staff review it, then manually input it. An office processing wholesale orders can easily spend an entire day just copying over faxed orders into QuickBooks. That’s before they even get to fulfilling the orders – you probably have a process in place to review the QuickBooks invoices before the order is packed or the customer’s account is charged.
Each step is an opportunity for an error, and no one knows that better than your customers.
Effective order processing software makes your customers happier. They can take their time placing orders, they don’t have to call someone up every time they need something, and the entire process becomes easier and more efficient.
They don’t have to stay late to place their orders any more than you need to in order to process them. They can do things at their speed, at their pace, between other tasks, and you just see the order that was automatically entered, ready for a quick review.
Everybody wins!
Wait, what about my sales reps? Won’t they lose business if they’re not in control of the transaction?
Using order processing software actually helps your sales reps get more business!
Instead of spending time managing and taking routine orders, they’re able to let those accounts place orders as needed.
Which frees up their time to find new customers.
The accounts still gets the products they knew they wanted to order, and your sales rep can focus on the upsale – increasing their revenue and making them more efficient.
It provides greater customer service all of their wholesale accounts, as well, as the point of contact can see the exact order they’re placing. Questions or concerns about the order? They can see exactly what’s going to be fulfilled, eliminating the back and forth of “what’s coming in that lasts order?” or “did I remember to get…?”
Customers have more insight into their purchases.
Salespeople have more time for sales activities.
Again… everybody wins!
Wholesale businesses don’t operate the way others do – and you need order processing software that fits your needs.
Every single wholesale business is different. Not just different between industries – of course a restaurant supplier is going to have different needs than a clothing distributor.
But even among restaurant supply distributors or clothing wholesalers, each business is unique.
QuickBooks offers tons of options, but you need something that you can further tailor to what you need for your business to run. You have a process that works, and the order processing software needs to complement that.
Which might be why you’ve waited to try one out.
Or you’re still using one that doesn’t quite meet all of your needs, but you’re too busy to try and search for something new that might be better.
After all, if it’s not broken, why fix it? You’re still running your business, orders still come in, people still have jobs to do.
But maybe, just maybe, you and your team could start going home early for a change.
Wouldn’t that be worth it?
Find out how you could be optimizing your wholesale order fulfillment – download our free ebook: Extending the Quickbooks Workflow:
