Carrying inventory can be very expensive. But you need to carry enough inventory to meet order demand quickly, yet not carry so much inventory as to weigh down your balance sheet.
Finding the right balance of inventory is difficult. Too much inventory restricts your available cash-flow, not enough inventory means you might miss an important sale.
One of the primary jobs of inventory control is managing this balance. In order to do that you need an inventory tool that gives you insights into the products that are selling and those that are just sitting on the shelf.
You need to know which SKUs are volume sellers in moderate demand as opposed to minimal consumables in high demand. You need to know which items are easy to get in contrast to those that have a significant lead time to replenish.
And you need to know whether you are actually making money off of each and every product you sell, every time you sell it, regardless of the quantity sold, even if you are discounting to special customers or at different times of the year.
If you don’t have an inventory system that can give you these kinds of metrics, then you are not controlling your inventory, your inventory is controlling you.
As I told you when we restarted "Warehouse Wednesdays," I would be looking for apps that you might not always hear so much about, might not see at the conferences or might not even find in the QuickBooks App Store. But they would be apps that looked good enough you should at least consider if you needed a solution like the one I was discussing.
One such app is inFlow Inventory.
Actually, inFlow Inventory (hereinafter simply called inFlow) is listed in the QuickBooks App Store.
In regard to QuickBooks Online inFlow can:
- Push inFlow Sales Orders to QBO as Customer Invoices*
- Push inFlow Purchase Orders to QBO as Vendor Bills*
- Update the Cost of Goods Sold and Inventory Asset accounts in QBO*
* -options vary based upon the user’s chosen set-up/configuration
Features listed within the QBO App Store include:
- Managing inventory and orders for businesses in over 90 countries.
- Tracking products and stocks levels
- Purchasing and receiving of products
- Barcoding for smartphone scanner use
- Selling, picking and shipping
- Online Showroom with B2B Portal
inFlow presently has a 3.9 overall rating in the QBO App Store reviews based only on 8 ratings, so I didn’t really give the QBAS Rating that much weight because of the limited number of reviewers. But you can read those reviews for yourself.
What I considered more important than any of the information in the App Store was the functionality of inFlow I found while exploring the product’s capabilities.
Inventory management
With inFlow, your inventory is available across all of your computers, laptops and tablets, so you can make business decisions from anywhere. inFlow creates records every time you receive and fulfill orders, cost and profit are recorded, too.
With inFlow you will know which SKUs are in stock, what’s been reserved, and what’s on order. You will have all the data yo will need to maintain the right quantities at the right locations.
In fact, inFlow’s reorder points keep your restocking proactive to prevent inventory from ever running out.
And multiple locations are no problem. You can not only set-up multiple locations but designate which users have access to which locations. Set separate sales characteristics for your SKUs on a location basis, track stock and reorder points at each location, and easily transfer inventory from one location to another.
But inventory control begins with purchasing and inFlow not only tracks your purchasing requirements and reports when it its time to reorder, but it streamlines the time-consuming process of purchasing while still giving you complete control over what and when to reorder.
In fact, inFlow lets you select team members who can approve purchases based on specific approval limits, so you have the proper oversight over every purchase decision.
Automated cost tracking built into inFlow gives you the ability to track the truest possible cost for every unit of every SKU based upon a moving average, FIFO, LIFO or a manual cost method you set. You will always have the most accurate product cost regardless of individual vendor prices over time.
And when you use inFlow with QuickBooks Online, the relevant purchasing and inventory data are pushed into QBO. Your product costs and payables are recorded for each purchase order. (Other set-up options are configurable.)
Buying your inventory from the supplier is only half the stocking requirement. The other half is receiving and put-away. If you fail to properly record receipt of inventory or improperly put-it-away, then you might as well not have purchased it in the first place.
This problem is compounded in a multi-location inventory environment.
Whether you have a single location or multiple locations, warehouse optimization features that inFlow has available can make the inventory receiving, put-away and order fulfillment process streamlined.
By organizing just one location into sub-locations to lay out a recommended best order of put-away and fulfillment (typically working in reverse of each other), your inventory management staff will save time, footsteps and equipment hours in handling your SKUs.
inFlow is optimized to support sub-location naming conventions that maximize stock put-away and order fulfillment. Combined with a perfect blend of barcodes and design labels, while supporting a wide variety of printers and scanners, inFlow makes it easy for your team to take advantage of smart scan and design label technology.
Your staff can scan to receive, to check stock, to adjust stock, to transfer stock, to look up orders, to pick accurately, to verify picks, and verify complete orders. Coupled with sub-location warehouse design, inFlow makes inventory turn-around "fast to the finish."
Inventory out the door typically means shipping and inFlow can speed that area of your workflow up too. inFlow has partnered with EasyPost to allow users to easily compare carrier rates including USPS, UPS, DHL, FedEx, and more.
Users can then select the most economical way to ship, purchase the freight and print mailing labels all within inFlow. They can even email the tracking information directly to the customer without ever having to leave the app.
Manufacturing
Even though they call it inFlow Inventory, inFlow offers more than just inventory, they also offer manufacturing.
You have the option of creating kits, or building assemblies, it all depends on the manufacturing you are doing.
Since I rarely worry about those people who want to throw some cookies, chocolates, jars of jam, some nuts and nick-nacks into a basket wrapped in cellophane and sell it as an "all-in-one" pulled out of those individual inventory items into a "kit." I will simply tell you that you can do all of that with inFlow without any problem at all.
But to be honest, why would you? You can do that in QuickBooks Online, so I would suggest you go ahead and do it there. If that’s all you are doing, you don’t need inFlow.
But if you are talking about real assemblies, with multiple layers or ancillary costs, then inFlow is something you may want to look at. That’s because manufacturing an assembly is more than just the sum of its parts.
You must be able to account for things like labor, incidentals, overhead and maybe even waste. inFlow can integrate all those extra costs into each assembly, so each finished product reflects the truest possible cost—and the selling price turns a profit, not a loss.
And you can create work orders directly from Invoices so that manufacturing can get the ball rolling to meet customer demand. Speaking of invoices and customers, we should go ahead and discuss the Sales features of inFlow.
Sales and Invoicing
Really would not do much good to have an inventory management and manufacturing system if you did not have a way to sell and invoice your products.
Sales are central to inFlow, so the app is designed to let you sell from anywhere. You can sell from your laptop, your smartphone or your tablet. You can even pull in sales from more than 30 ecommerce platforms, including Amazon and Shopify.
inFlow makes it easy to track sales, identify which sales can be immediately fulfilled, which are pending stock, which are manufacturing orders, and which are invoiced awaiting payment.
inFlow pushes sales information directly to QuickBooks Online so you can be confident that your finances are up-to-date. Revenues and Cost-of-Goods Sold (COGS) are recorded when sales are posted from inventory on customer purchases.
Payments posted into inFlow also can be pushed to QBO, or this feature can be disabled if you wish to accept payment through QBO rather than inFlow. (Set-up options are configurable as shown below.)
Tax rates within inFlow need to be mapped to taxes within QuickBooks Online. As a general rule your inFlow taxes should be set-up to match those previously configured in QBO. For more information on this feature, see this inFlow help document.
Another aspect of their Sales functionality that cannot be overlooked is its B2B Showroom, which is built into inFlow. All of your product details can be made available in this real time portal with the flip of a switch providing product names, descriptions, illustrations and prices.
You have full control over the display along with your branding and the information you want displayed. You can even create special Showrooms for select customer groups, or other purposes (like clearance sales).
Full order and payment features are available at a flip of a switch if you want more than just catalog viewing functionality.
Pricing
inFlow offers various pricing plans that can be paid for monthly or annually. Make certain to speak with an inFlow representative regarding each plans’ features before signing up.
- Entrepreneur Plan: $89 USD/mo. Billed annually
- Small Business Plan: $219 USD/mo. Billed annually
- Mid-size Plan: $439 USD/mo. Billed annually
- Enterprise Plan: $1,055 USD/mo. Billed annually
NOTE: Pricing information is provided for the readers’ convenience. Insightful Accountant makes no assurance that the prices reflected are accurate at the time of publication or when the reader is referencing the article (they were valid when the article content was being researched). Readers should review the website for current pricing information.
Its pricing options depend on your business requirements. Features, functions, options and capabilities will vary significantly from one plan to another. Readers should thoroughly review and understand any plan they select before entering into any subscription for service.
inFlow offers a "14-Day Trial Plan" that can give you an idea of how it will work for you before subscribing.
Conclusion
inFlow appears to be a very easy to use app full of inventory management features to help you manage your SKUs on a multi-location as well as sub-location basis. It offers great tools for warehouse management in terms of inventory receiving, control, put-away, picking, order processing/shipping and stock tracking/transfers.
Its built-in sales portal offerings are a definite plus if you are looking for a way to offer your customers an online catalog purchasing option without using a traditional ecommerce store.
Sorry folks, inFlow doesn’t offer integration with QuickBooks Desktop. It does offer integration with Xero in addition to the integration with QBO I discussed within this article.
Acknowledgments and Disclosures:
Content used within this feature was partially derived or adapted from inFlow source materials. Graphics used herein were adapted from inFlow Inventory sources including their product and/or website. Adapted or derived source materials published by Insightful Accountant within this feature are for educational and product promotional purposes only.
inFlow Inventory as used herein, refers to a registered trademarked product produced by Archon Systems, Inc., which has been ranked as one of Canada’s top 500 fastest growing companies. They are located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
As used herein, QuickBooks® and QuickBooks Online refer to one or more registered trademark products of Intuit Inc., a publicly-traded corporation (Nasdaq: INTU) headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Other trade names, if any, used herein, may refer specifically to registered trademark products held by their respective owners. They are used solely for informational and educational purposes.
This is an editorial feature, not sponsored content. None of the vendors within this article have paid Insightful Accountant or the author any remuneration to be included in this feature. The article is provided solely for informational and educational purposes.
The publication of this article does not represent any endorsement by either the author or Insightful Accountant.
Note: Registered Trademark ® symbols have been eliminated from the articles within this publication for brevity due to the frequency or abundance with which they would otherwise appear or be repeated. We attempt to credit such trademarked products within our respective article footnotes and disclosures.
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