B2B Info Center

Best Practices for Wholesale Order Management: QuickBooks Sales Orders

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.

QuickBooks eCommerce: Tips For Setting Up Wholesale Customers

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.

Why QuickBooks Premier Manufacturing & Wholesale Beats Pro and QBO

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.

Why Integrating QuickBooks' Custom Pricing is Necessary for an Order Management System

Many manufacturers and distributors have discovered the benefits of implementing an order management system which allows their customers to directly place orders online. This saves the time consuming process of using the inefficient QuickBooks sales order and invoice screens for order entry.

Overview of QuickBooks Price Levels

Growing a product-based wholesale business is hard work that often requires tough negotiating skills. Along the way, you've probably had customers ask for across-the-board discounts, custom prices on specific products, and other special incentives. 

Learn How A Wholesale Online Ordering System Organizes Your Business

More business means more orders. More orders means more invoices. That means more forms, more data entry, and more transferring of information between different departments. It's easy for a form or piece of information to get lost in the shuffle.

Quickbooks Best Practices for Wholesale Order Management

When you run a product-based business, it's critical that you have a firm grasp on supply and demand: your inventory levels plus purchase orders to your supplier and/or work orders to your production floor are your supply, while sales orders plus sales forecast are your demand. It's easy to make errors when you don't have an accurate view into your inventory. You could sell products that you don't have in stock or fail to order or produce products in a timely manner. You can also make errors if you don’t have an accurate view into your current and future sales.

The effort can be further complicated if you run a wholesale product-based business. You may have different pricing structures for different clients. You may mix in direct-to-consumer sales with wholesale distribution. You may also vary your products depending on the client, or be in a seasonal industry.

Learn How an Order Entry Software Will Save Your Company Money

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Looking for an easy way to cut costs and increase efficiency at your business? Consider implementing order entry software. An order entry software system that is customizable and integrates with QuickBooks allows your customers, sales reps, and customer service people to efficiently enter their orders directly through an online portal. The order information is then automatically and accurately transferred to QuickBooks, saving time spent on data entry. 

How Do Your Customers Benefit From An Online Order Management System?

If you’re considering implementing an online order management system, you’re probably aware of all the ways that it will improve your process. It will greatly reduce order entry and the time spent responding to routine customer service inquiries, increasing efficiency, reducing errors, and eliminating duplicated work.

An online order management system doesn’t just benefit you, though. It also benefits your customers. The system will give them a quick, convenient, and 24/7 way to place orders without having to call or email your staff, or fill out old-fashioned Excel or Word order forms. They'll have instant, online updates on the status of their orders, and they’ll have greater confidence that their orders will arrive on-time and with the correct items. An online order management system also makes your company look more professional in the eyes of your customers.

Businesses who implement an online ordering system often say that their customers experience a more efficient and convenient ordering process. That increases customer satisfaction and loyalty. By implementing an online system, you’re improving your customers' businesses as well as your own.

Here are three ways they benefit:

Order Entry Software: What Tasks Does It Automate?

Everybody loves taking a new order from a customer. It’s in the fulfillment of the order that things can get a little dicey. If your business is like most, you haven’t quite found the perfect streamlined system for fulfilling customer orders as efficiently as possible.

Maybe the order is initially placed on an order form with a salesperson or over the phone with a customer service representative. That person may then input the order into an electronic system. Many companies then use multiple platforms to communicate the order information to various departments like billing, distribution, and customer service.