Enhance Quickbooks for Digital B2B Ordering and Inventory Management

As a wholesale business owner, you have made decisions along the way on what technology to use to enable your business.  In this case, you chose a version of the Quickbooks suite of products.  As your business has continued to grow and evolve, you have found yourself in a position where you feel you are starting to outgrow your technology choices…even though, for the most part, you get what you need out of your Quickbooks technology.

It becomes an overwhelming thought to consider looking for another software solution to meet all of the needs of your growing business and even more overwhelming to feel like you will need to start all over again with a new software solution.  The thought of hours upon hours of learning a new software, populating the data, making sure you haven’t missed anything in the transition feels like a ton of bricks looming over your head.

This is where a solution that integrates with your existing software starts to become the better option for your business.  If you are getting what you need out of Quickbooks for your accounting and invoicing needs, why disrupt that?  

“Integrations are meant to break data silos and can leverage systems to perform more efficiently or intensively.”  https://learn.g2.com/reasons-to-integrate-software

Quickbooks for Customer Ordering

Quickbooks for Digital Wholesale Catalogs

Quickbooks for Multi-Pricing Levels

Quickbooks for Sales Reps

Quickbooks for Inventory

Quickbooks for EDI

CHART:  OrderEase: A Digital Expansion of Quickbooks

Questions to ask yourself when considering a Quickbooks - OrderEase integration

How hard is it to get started with a Quickbooks - OrderEase integration?

With a digital integration between your Quickbooks account and OrderEase, you can continue to use all of the functionality of Quickbooks you have grown to love, but also position yourself for digital transformation and enablement.

I know that’s a mouthful, but what it really means is that you will have yourself set up to do business more efficiently, digitally and in WAY more channels than ever before.  All with minimal effort and minimal ongoing maintenance to sell in multiple channels.  

Just like the way your bank feed is integrated into your Quickbooks, OrderEase is the product data, inventory, customer and order feed going into and out of your Quickbooks account.

Not only can you provide digital access to your existing customers to see and order your product from you, you can also use Quickbooks + OrderEase to continue to grow your business faster than you could ever do it if you maintained a manual method of order management and product data management.  

The best part is you don’t even need to have an eCommerce website built and maintained for your customers to order from you.  All they need is the link to your OrderEase account, they log in with their credentials and they have their own account where they can see your catalogs with their pricing!

Source

Key Enhancements to Quickbooks

Quickbooks for Customer Ordering

With an easy-to-use portal, your customers can log in to view your catalogs with their assigned pricing.  As a bonus, your business can be set up as “public” within the OrderEase ecosystem.  This means any retailers using the OrderEase platform who buy from other suppliers in the category you are listed in, will be able to discover you, view your catalog (without pricing) and if interested in your products, request a “relationship” with your business.  If you approve this new customer relationship, you will be able to assign their pricing and they will be able to view your catalogs with their assigned pricing.

At their convenience, your customers can work on building their orders and once ready, they can be submitted digitally and pushed right into your Quickbooks account.  The amount of time and effort reduced with order entry, creating price lists, creating print catalogs and more is significantly reduced.

An additional benefit your customer will have is the ability to view past orders they have placed using their OrderEase account.  They can create a list of favorite products for quick and easy re-ordering.

Quickbooks for Digital Wholesale Catalogs

You can have as many catalogs as you need for your business within your OrderEase account.  By grouping products into catalogs, you can control what products customers can see / access as well as create different types of catalogs such as seasonal / promotional, dropship or other types of catalogs.

You control the settings for which customer groups can see which catalogs!

Digital catalogs allow you to get new products in front of customers quicker than ever before.  They also give you the ability to run quick sales and blow out inventory.  With the flexibility of the OrderEase system, there are so many options and ideas that can be leveraged to suit your business needs.

Quickbooks for Multi-Pricing Levels

Quite often wholesale businesses have different customers who receive different prices for the same product.  This is not a problem for OrderEase, our data structure is tailored to handle some of the most difficult pricing structures!

Catalogs in our system are independent of price so you won’t need to have a separate catalog for each price assignment for different customers.  We manage this with pricing levels assigned to groups of customers.  Each customer group with a pricing level will only see their assigned pricing when they access catalogs they are assigned to.

We find many ways customers have tried to fit a square peg into a round hole by trying to apply different pricing for different customers within Quickbooks.  

One customer went as far as cloning their product list and creating new product codes and pricing to ensure their customers would receive the allocated pricing.

The problem with this:

1. Every time a product's price goes up, the company would need to go into their Quickbooks account and search for every copy of that product and make the price changes manually.
2. Every time an order was placed by a customer, the order desk person would need to remember which product code should be used for that customer to ensure the proper pricing would be used.
3. Running a promotion for existing products was almost not worth it due to the amount of manual intervention required.
4. As the business grew, this type of manual order entry and manipulation was just not scalable.

By integrating Quickbooks with OrderEase, the solution provided instant ROI.  All cloned products were eliminated so pricing was being run off a single version of the product.  Price lists and customer groups were created in OrderEase allowing proper assignments and bulk editing / importing when required.  

The biggest win is when an order gets created and submitted by a customer or sales rep via OrderEase.  The order gets pushed digitally via the integration into Quickbooks and the price in the Quickbooks invoice reflects the price taken from the customer price list within OrderEase.

This digital order integration via OrderEase eliminates the need for time required for manual order entry as well as eliminating entry errors.

Quickbooks for Sales Reps

If you have sales people out on the road or online, I am sure they will appreciate the ability to take orders real-time vs writing orders down on paper, or filling out an excel sheet to send into the office later.  Having a digital catalog with accurate customer pricing at their fingertips is priceless!

With the digital catalog, it’s easy to show off new products immediately vs waiting for the next print version or the marketing materials to be generated.  Generating quick revenue on new items is a sales person’s dream!  Not to mention the fact they are able to reduce their administrative time significantly.

The barcode scanning functionality further enhances the power of the sales rep app that comes with integrating OrderEase with Quickbooks.  Your rep can walk into a store and just with their phone and the OrderEase app, walk through with the customer and scan items and enter quantities to order quickly and easily!

But the even bigger bonus with the sales rep functionality, is the customers can build and submit their orders, and with the proper configuration, a notification is sent to the sales rep to review the order.  At this point, the rep can review and push the order directly into Quickbooks OR the rep can hold it and discuss upsell / complimentary product options before releasing the order.  Once again, since OrderEase is highly configurable, there are many options and workflows that can be set to suit your business processes.

The best part to your business…OrderEase does NOT charge on a per user basis like most software companies do!  You can have as many sales reps using the account as you need without additional subscription fees.

Quickbooks for Inventory

Unless you have chosen to use the “Plus” or “Advanced” version of Quickbooks with inventory capabilities, your version of Quickbooks does not have the ability to show and manage inventory.  For many businesses, it doesn’t make sense to upgrade their Quickbooks account to just access the inventory feature.  The additional benefits of this upgraded Quickbooks does not come close to the features you can access by integrating and leveraging OrderEase with your “Simple Start” or “Essentials” Quickbooks package.

With the Quickbooks - OrderEase integration, inventory is a bonus feature, not just a primary feature that you get in any other upgrade option.

If you are selling via multiple channels and have catalogs created for each channel you are selling into, you will be able to manage inventory allocations to each channel catalog you have created.  This is great if you want to keep specific inventory allocations for certain types of customers.

Quickbooks for EDI

We find a lot of suppliers want to sell to the larger retailers but often dismiss the idea soon after they discover how complicated the rules are to engage with EDI, plus the expenses involved!  Plus, even if you do decide to do EDI, different retailers deal with different EDI providers…which means, you are stuck playing by their rules and their costs.  AND to top it all off, forget about integration to get your orders digitally, that cost and option is prohibitive…until now with OrderEase.

Integrate once with OrderEase to your Quickbooks account and leave the rest to us to move documents back and forth between each retailer you choose to sell to.  Of course this is incredibly over-simplified, there are some steps in the middle to start trading with each retailer. BUT once those steps are completed, you will be able to manage the orders digitally vs the old rip and read style most small - mid size suppliers typically do.

This covers the key features that make it worth integrating OrderEase with your Quickbooks account.  The table below identifies even more features you will be able to leverage with this integration.

OrderEase: A Digital Expansion of Quickbooks

Questions to ask yourself when considering a Quickbooks - OrderEase integration

We have compiled a quick list of questions to ask yourself as you are working through your options.  If you answer yes to any of the following questions, it means this integration is the right option to scale your business with minimal disruption:

1. Do I have sales reps?
2. Do I want customers to be able to place orders independently?
3. Do I have different prices for different customers?
4. Do I want to show inventory to customers and show out of stock if there is no inventory?
5. Do I want to be able to sell into big retailers but operate their ordering via EDI?
6. Do I want to offer a dropship program?
7. Do I want to sell on multiple channels but don’t want the hassle of updating / managing multiple programs?

How hard is it to get started with a Quickbooks - OrderEase integration?

Step 1:  Talk to our sales team so we can ensure we are getting you the best option and pricing.

Step 2:  After you decide to go forward with the integration, you will receive a dedicated project manager who will work with you to optimize your account configuration to ensure it works the best possible way with your business.  All businesses operate in their unique ways, which is why we take the time to understand and work with you to make this the best experience for all!

Step 3:  Training

Step 4:  You’re all set!

Ready to start?  Contact an OrderEase sales rep today!  Click on the "Show Me How" button below.