Growing a product-based wholesale business is hard work that often requires tough negotiating skills. You've probably had customers ask for discounts on all products, custom prices for specific items, and other special incentives.
QuickBooks offers some order management tools, although they are limited. As your business grows, you will encounter these limitations. The solution is to find order management software that is more powerful and designed for B2B companies yet integrates with QuickBooks, so you don’t have to start from scratch.
When do you know it is time to take your QuickBooks order management software to the next level? Let’s take a look at five signs that tell you it’s time to make the move:
Order entry software is designed to make your life easier. As a B2B business with sales reps, you may need to enter orders all the time. It can now be done more easily with software that offers a wide range of benefits. This allows you to gain more productivity and have more tools at your fingertips.
Streamlining your order management process in QuickBooks can significantly enhance your operational efficiency. For wholesalers, manufacturers, importers, or distributors, aligning your processes with QuickBooks can lead to substantial time and cost savings. This involves leveraging sales orders. QuickBooks is designed to optimize your workflow with sales orders for your wholesale customers. Click Home in QuickBooks, and you’ll notice that the sales process begins with a sales order.
Many wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors have discovered the benefits of implementing an order management system that allows their customers to place orders directly online. This saves the time-consuming process of using the inefficient QuickBooks sales order and invoice screens for order entry.
Providing sales reps with online order entry software that integrates with QuickBooks can make life easier for manufacturers, wholesalers, and distributors. First, we’ll look at what’s in it for the company and then see what’s in it for the reps.
Many small business owners often find themselves without the time to fully embrace new technology. Who can spare the hours to master a new platform annually? Who has the bandwidth to explore and troubleshoot potential new technologies that could benefit their business? QuickBooks efficiently handles your needs, and your team is well-versed in its use. Currently, your employees manage orders via phone and email, and while this method isn't the quickest for entering data into QuickBooks, it gets the job done. However, as your business grows or if you're aiming to expand, relying on "at least it works" may no longer suffice, especially when most of your time is consumed by routine order processing.
Order processing, for small wholesale businesses in particular, can be a nightmare — as a wholesaler, you’re acutely aware of this.
eCommerce solutions built for B2C businesses are usually not appropriate for B2B businesses.
It’s very common for up-and-coming manufacturers, distributors, wholesalers, and importers to think that their site needs to be like Amazon. That’s simply not the best way to do business with B2B customers. It’s not how your customers want to do business; quite frankly, it’s not how you want to do it. It’s worthwhile to emulate certain aspects of the Amazon experience, but not necessarily all of them.
Order processing is a seemingly simple, standard business practice that wholesalers, distributors, manufacturers, and importers deal with every single day. If you’re using QuickBooks, you’ve likely learned where the issues in your process are, and you’ve also probably realized that QuickBooks alone isn’t the solution to those issues.
