What’s something that ecommerce and brick-and-mortar retail stores have commonly? You probably guessed it: inventory. And once you have inventory, there’s inventory management. Quite simply, when you sell physical products, it is inevitable that someone may be tracking what’s in stock, out of stock, and requirements to be ordered, among other factors.
When starting out, most SMBs use manual methods for inventory management purposes, namely spreadsheets. In reality, one survey of over 1,100 U.S. small businesses revealed that an impressive 43% either try not to track their inventory after all or count on manual processes. Of this 33% who use inventory management software, however, just less than half use QuickBooks.
For most businesses, adopting QuickBooks may be the next move for improving their inventory management. A well known option for meeting accounting needs, at the time of 2017, QuickBooks Online alone boasted over 2 million global customers. If you want to Set Up And Track QuickBooks Inventory and you need any help then Contact our Proadvisors.
With this in mind, winning a popularity contest doesn’t make QuickBooks the best option for inventory management.
Although it could be an excellent fit for many, listed here are 5 problems you may possibly face when performing inventory management in QuickBooks.
1. QuickBooks isn’t designed for inventory management.
As noted, around 13% of SMBs use QuickBooks for inventory management purposes. Despite this, the program is definitely not designed to meet all of your inventory needs because that is not its primary purpose: Quickbooks was created to serve primarily as accounting software.
Designed for accounting, QuickBooks provides the full scope of features to generally meet your cash management needs, including features that accommodate bookkeeping, payment acquisition, payroll, and time-tracking. With this specific emphasis on meeting your accounting needs, QuickBooks provides limited offerings for inventory management.
Because of this, the software may are not able to meet your inventory management expectations, but it’s not built to. Rather, QuickBooks better serves to generally meet your accounting needs when integrated with a system designed specifically for inventory management.
2. You’ll likely need additional programs to bridge the gaps.
While QuickBooks claims to be an all-in-one business management tool, you may find yourself the need to fill in the gaps. For example, QuickBooks offers limited sales order management support, particularly the ability to track unshipped orders. To help keep an eye on unshipped orders, you’ll have to resort to using a spreadsheet program or perhaps.
As well as missing generally applicable inventory features, there’s a stronger chance you’ll need to use additional programs in order to make up for the industry-specific features you’re missing out on as well. For example, QuickBooks does not offer inventory management features for manufacturing or distribution.
Despite its limitations, it’s valuable to notice that integrations with QuickBooks can be found to assist satisfy your inventory needs. That said, a majority of these apps have few to no reviews or poor ratings, which increases their likelihood of failing your expectations.
3. The limitations may grow as you scale.
QuickBooks Enterprise, in particular, claims to be designed to grow with your business. However, besides the limited access to features, you will probably find yourself limited by the alleged scalability provided by this software. From limitations in file size to users, may very well not have what you ought to meet your business’s needs of today or while you grow.
For example, one notable limitation is QuickBooks’s limitations on your company file size as well. Even for the Enterprise version of the software, your company can only just have no more than 1GB of storage. As such, if you already fully know that you’ll need more storage than this software could possibly offer, you might want to start considering other available choices.
4. There’s still an opportunity for human error to occur.
One of the biggest advantages of inventory management software is that it often reduces the potential for errors to take place. With fewer errors, your business can save on time, money, and resources. Unfortunately, Quickbooks doesn’t aid in this department just as much as it could.
Unfortunately, if you supplement QuickBooks with additional outside programs or spreadsheets, your chances for human error greatly increase. Simply because it is highly likely that someone is going to be manually entering or transferring data from one program to some other, and every time data moves from 1 location to another, the chances of an error occurring increases.
In this manner, while an inventory management system can help resolve problems with data entry to sales forecasting, it may be less helpful when you were getting around the data manually from a single system to some other.
5. You’ll receive limited inventory analytics and reporting.
Finally, one of the most significant issues presented by QuickBooks is its limited reporting offerings. With some information kept in outside programs, perhaps spreadsheets, QuickBooks won’t have all the info essential to give you comprehensive reports.
If your reports are missing data, perhaps all about those yet to be shipped orders, your gauge for the business’s health to your sales forecasts are extremely likely to be inaccurate. Even with all the data in position, it could be hard to customize your inventory reports to generally meet your preferences.
With a truly all-encompassing inventory management system, receiving comprehensive reports shouldn’t be an issue. Not only can reports include most of the necessary information, but you should certainly tailor those reports in a fashion that meets your specific needs.
Or even Inventory Management in QuickBooks, Then What?
While there are lots of reasons performing inventory management in QuickBooks isn’t ideal, the software is an excellent option for some businesses. For example, if your organization is just getting started, QuickBooks is a cost-effective option, with even QuickBooks Enterprise ranging from only $1,000~ to just under $5,000 each year. Moreover, these tools can be easily purchased online and do not require an application developer.
Having said that, if you’re now convinced that QuickBooks is not the best option for your business, you are wondering what options you should look at pursuing instead. To meet up with your industry-specific needs, in addition to needs specific to your online business, consider acquiring a custom-tailored software solution.
For more than ten years, ClikFocus has been building custom-tailored applications for non-profit and enterprise-level businesses alike. From unique inventory management methods to ecommerce systems, the sky’s the limit on what we could create for your business. Bid farewell to inventory management in Quickbooks, and call us today.
