Inventory management and control require precision, flexibility, and real-time configuration. Staying ahead of the competition, especially during busy seasons, requires seamless inventory control. When a customer walks into your retail store or visits your e-commerce website, they select a product, purchase, and leave. But what happens behind the screen?
As soon as the customer finalizes the purchase and makes the payment, the company’s inventory staff updates the inventory data to reflect the purchase.
Traditionally, inventory control and order management processes were considered behind-the-scenes functions. But modern-day customers want to stay in the loop too. A recent IBM research report revealed that over 72% of customers want to know the company’s inventory status. Their purchase decision depends on availability, delivery expedition, and stock quality.
What’s more, over 66% of the respondents said that they would not make a second trip to the store if they found desired products out-of-stock.
Why Should Organizations Optimize Inventory and Order Management?
The demand for customized products and tailored services has risen dramatically in the last couple of years. Customers not only want high-quality, reliable offerings, but they also expect a seamless and intuitive customer experience.
Purchase decisions are no longer transactional; they’ve become a value-added, key business differentiator and unique business proposition.
QuickBooks is a prominent name in the world of inventory control and order management. Let’s delve deeper and learn how to optimize inventory using QuickBooks.
The Three-Step Approach
QuickBooks is known for its user-friendliness, fast interface, robust functionality, and impeccable resilience. Businesses can optimize all the goods in their warehouses by entering some data and clicking a few tabs.
QuickBooks inventory management software allows manufacturers and distributors to stay updated on stock availability in three simple steps.
1. Enter the Order
When a customer places an order, a sales order is inserted into the software. That’s essentially an agreement between the buyer and seller. At this point, neither income is generated nor inventory is released. The software creates a placeholder for both parties to review, analyze, and peruse the sales order.
QuickBooks shows “about to be sold,” which implies that a particular inventory item has been selected by a customer and is ready for shipment. This way, sellers can stay ahead of their daily sales target and know whether they can sell more units that day or not. And the best part is QuickBooks generates an inventory-level report that shows the real-time status of the stock.
2. Fulfill the Order
The next step is order fulfillment. Whether a customer orders one unit or multiple, QuickBooks uses a Sales Order Fulfillment worksheet that states order details and delivery timelines.
After fulfillment, the inventory is released, but the system still doesn’t record until it tracks the generated revenue. QuickBooks doesn’t know that the customer is liable to pay until this point. This is taken care of in the next step.
3. Invoice the Order
QuickBooks records the amount receivable at the invoicing stage that the customer will pay after receiving the purchased product(s).
The sales order function can be simplified and optimized. The Premier and Enterprise QuickBooks editions enable users to project and anticipate sales by knowing what customers want and order more. This is backed by the data available in the purchase history section.
Optimizing Inventory through QuickBooks
QuickBooks allows businesses to optimize their inventory in numerous ways, and two of them are discussed below:
1. Real-time Inventory Control
A recent study shows that over 44% of the total retail businesses find inventory-related operations highly challenging and difficult to perfect. They encounter several obstacles when optimizing and keeping track of orders and invoices.
And just like brick-and-mortar retailers, B2B businesses also find inventory and order control hard to manage. This directly impacts their revenue stream and makes their order cycle inefficient. Through QuickBooks, you can stay at the top of inventory management and control by closely monitoring current sales orders and tracking new ones.
The software updates and records customer order products on a real-time basis and helps you stock in-demand items before a customer places an order and finds out that your products are out of stock.
2. Financial Management
QuickBooks inventory management software ensures complete immunity from financial setbacks and hiccups. SMEs often encounter malware and viruses in their financial management software and lose precious data. A lot of which include sales orders, purchase invoices, and stock updates.
With order board, inventory control mechanism, and financial management integration, employees can multitask and maintain their A-game data entry. QuickBooks also allows you to track business expenses, create analytical reports, and perform budget analysis.
You can also integrate QuickBooks with PayPal, T-Sheets time tracker, and other helpful management tools for unmatched inventory optimization. Financial management’s practical benefits are inventory tracking, expense tracking, creating financial reports, and budget analysis.
3. Enhanced Automation
Technological advancements have disrupted all aspects of B2B and B2C markets. Enhanced personalization, agility, and automation are the leading trends. Previously, B2B procedures didn’t offer a holistic customer experience as B2C businesses because they weren’t sure how it’d affect their client relationships and ROI.
But as we speak, more wholesalers, suppliers, and distributors are investing in a 360-degree commerce experience for their B2B clients. And while organizations continue to automate their processes, a deeper need to optimize inventory management is developing. Using software integration tools and techniques, companies can automate their whole customer cycle process and offer value-added products and services.
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