Every manufacturer welcomes growth, but transitioning from a small to mid-size wholesaler brings several challenges. One of the biggest issues is the burden of increased data entry. The more orders you take, the more data you enter and need to share with various departments. Eventually, the amount of information being entered and shared will become overwhelming and a new process for entering data will be needed.
To address this challenge, any wholesalers are turning to order entry software that will reduce the data entry burden, protect the business from human errors and ensure a better and more timely experience for the customer. Here are three ways order entry software can help your business.
Your Customers Help Themselves
If you’re like most small wholesalers, you probably take customers orders through a variety of channels: fax, phone, email, or other. Unfortunately, all these channels require someone on your team to enter these orders into your QuickBooks or accounting software.
With order entry software for Quickbooks, your customers can place orders at their convenience through an online order portal. They’ll have access to your products, customer-specific pricing, and inventory. Additionally, customers can easily access their account for previous order history, payment verification and order tracking information. By displaying this information in the customer portal, one can expect a decrease in customer service inquiries as well as less time on the phone answering common questions.
The Software Integrates with QuickBooks
By sending orders directly to QuickBooks, order entry software eliminates the need for entering the data manually. Depending on how your company handles accounting, this may help reduce the fees you pay to an outside firm, or it might free up your in-house accountant to work on other projects.
Better yet, this connection between Quickbooks and your order entry software means that customers can check the status of their orders without any interaction from your team.
Eliminate Incorrect Orders
People make mistakes. It’s human nature. Unfortunately, human error in the wholesale business can result in unhappy customers as well as extra labor and shipping costs.
Order entry software eliminates the risk of human error. Similar to the way e-commerce companies list their part numbers, descriptions and order options online, order entry systems enable you to do the same thing for your wholesale customers. This enables your customers to select from products you’ve verified are correct. By creating business rules for quantity multiples and volume minimums, you’ll ensure that each is order is correct the first time.
Consider implementing order entry software to significantly reduce data entry in your wholesale and manufacturing business.