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.
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.
If your customer order management procedures are causing order errors, late deliveries, customer dissatisfaction and a host of other problems, you and your employees may be spending a lot of time doing things over. According to The Supply Chain Council, the definition of perfect order fulfillment is "the percentage of orders meeting delivery performance with complete and accurate documentation and no delivery damage."
Order processing is a seemingly simple, common business practice that wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, and importers deal with every single day. If you're using QuickBooks, you've likely learned very quickly where the issues in your ordering process are, and you've also probably realized that QuickBooks alone isn't going to be the solution to those issues.
As a manufacturer or wholesaler, your company likely deals with a large number of orders for many products. It is important that you are able to find an excellent online order management system that will fit right in with your current systems. Finding software that is built specifically for wholesalers and manufacturers will not only help your back office, but will also give your sales reps and customers the ability to order online and gain access to their account information. This simple addition will keep your business running smoothly and orders shipping efficiently.
QuickBooks is a powerful piece of software, but, like all pieces of software, it has limits. This is nothing against QuickBooks — far from it. QuickBooks does what it does very well, it's designed to take care of very specific tasks, and it doesn't make the mistake that many pieces of software have made over the years by trying to be something it's not.