Outgrown QuickBooks – Managing Inventory

As we’ve discussed in previous posts in the Outgrown QuickBooks Series, there are numerous signs that your QuickBooks solution is slowing down or hindering your company’s growth. For example, the solution isn’t scalable enough to keep up with employee growth, you‘re having difficulty with your budgeting and forecasting processes, and you don’t have the tools to achieve compliance.

Without insight into these key business functions, your inventory management capabilities will usually suffer. How do you go about streamlining inventory management, while staying profitable?

Most likely you didn’t purchase QuickBooks because of its inventory management capabilities, but you may have used it for this purpose as well. QuickBooks even added new functionality over the past few years such as location tracking, bin locations, and tracking parts by serial or lot number.

These added features made you feel like you could get by with QuickBooks, but it’s important to remember that getting by isn’t enough. As your company grows, you want to constantly be thinking ahead and anticipating your next move. With such basic inventory management capabilities, it is nearly impossible to set yourself up for future profitability.

As managing your inventory becomes more involved, you’ll most likely find that QuickBooks lacks the features you need to effectively and efficiently manage your inventory. For example, you may need to track inventory in multiple warehouses, perform barcode scanning, or do kitting.

In addition, QuickBooks will only calculate average costing of inventory so you’ll need to find another way to determine the landed costs. This is a huge disadvantage for your business and should be one of the major factors in your decision to move forward with a new system.

After all, if you can’t determine inventory valuation, then your pricing strategies are nothing more than guesswork. If you can’t effectively track and analyze what inventory you have on hand, it becomes nearly impossible to perform demand forecasting. These shortcomings prevent your organization from experiencing the growth it can achieve with a complete business management system.

Learn More: SAP Business One: Inventory and Distribution

Investing in a more dynamic business system with strong inventory management capabilities is just what your organization needs. If any of the above pain points resonate with you, it is a good idea to reevaluate just how well QuickBooks helps you perform.