Every wholesaler, manufacturer, and distributor welcomes growth, but transitioning from a small to a mid-size operation 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, many 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 wholesale customers help themselves
If you’re like most smaller wholesalers, you probably take orders through a variety of channels: phone, email, or other. Unfortunately, all these channels require someone on your team to manually enter these orders into QuickBooks.
With order entry software, customers can place orders conveniently through an online B2B customer portal. They’ll have access to your products, customer-specific pricing, and inventory. Additionally, customers can easily access their previous order history, payment history, 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 B2B customer portal integrates with QuickBooks
By sending wholesale orders directly to QuickBooks, order entry software eliminates the need to enter the data manually. Depending on how your company handles accounting, this may help reduce the fees you pay to an outside firm or 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.
Eliminates incorrect orders
People make mistakes. It’s human nature. Unfortunately, human error in the wholesale business can result in unhappy customers and extra labor and shipping costs.
Order entry software eliminates the risk of human error. Similar to how traditional eCommerce sellers list their part numbers, descriptions, and order options online, order entry systems enable you to do the same for your wholesale customers. This enables your customers to select products you’ve verified as correct. Creating business rules for quantity multiples and volume minimums ensures that each order is correct the first time.
