Who doesn't love inventory? People with inventory messes, that's who. Of course the solution for an inventory mess is a good Inventory/ERP App. That's why we are going to review some that are making an appearance on the exhibit hall floor at this year's "Scaling New Heights" in Orlando, Florida. This is the first of a multi-part series.
Acctivate is Inventory Management Software that professes to operate like an operational hub for growing businesses. It offers a combination of inventory, order and business management features focused on growth, insight and scalability centered around QuickBooks integration.
Acctivate gives small- to medium-sized businesses complete control over operations at a company-wide, real-time visibility level with business data centralized in a single system.
While Acctivate has a core of features focused on meeting the needs of businesses that have outgrown QuickBooks inventory and order capabilities, it offers a modular design to allow its customers the opportunity to pick and choose the feature set that will work best for themselves.
Simply put, why pay for features in a pre-configured bundled product that you don't need when you can select only those you need.
- Acctivate Inventory does not routinely sync with the items in QuickBooks. Once the initial sync is done, all active items are copied to Acctivate, including the quantity on hand and value inventory in QuickBooks. Then, QuickBooks items are turned off and Acctivate takes full responsibility for all Inventory Management. Any transactions that affect inventory, including transactions to the inventory asset account, must be handled only in Acctivate to ensure that Acctivate and QuickBooks are kept in balance. When transactions are posted from Acctivate to QuickBooks, you do not see the part numbers if you want to print the invoice or run any item specific reports (you must do so from Acctivate).
- Whether you need to look at summaries, details or both, Acctivate dashboards are a dynamic, interactive solution that enable you to gain insight and make better business decisions.
- Acctivate prides itself on providing business insight tools that bring on-demand visibility of each business to the forefront, enabling informed decisions to be made. One such tool is event timelines that deliver a simplified view of historical and active data and critical insights.
- Business activities manage and track any activity, issue, follow-up, event or project. Each time users log into Acctivate, they are presented with a current list of alerts and business activities. Business activities help you assign, manage and track activities throughout the organization. For example, business activities will track your projects and tasks, and then business alerts will make sure you never miss a deadline again.
- Acctivate decision support tools simplify the decision-making process by providing easy access to real-time business intelligence across all areas of your company.
- Sales management and order fulfillment tools integrated with inventory control software can be the sales team’s secret weapon in an ever-increasingly competitive environment. Real-time access to accurate inventory and product information keeps orders flowing, and customers happy and away from competitors.
- Acctivate has a set of customizable contact and lead management tools that enable company-wide visibility, access, management and analysis into the sales and account management process. When the customer is ready to buy, they want the process to be handled quickly, accurately, efficiently and via their preferred channel. The key to effectively handling all sales channels with accuracy and consistency is centralizing—having the data, including inventory quantities, in one location.
- The power of a sales management system directly integrated with inventory and other company areas is most apparent at the time of the sale. Quotes are converted to sales orders with Acctivate's one-click conversion process—even for orders with complex components, parts or configurations.
- Counter sales, returns and exchanges can be handled quickly with multiple payment options, barcode scanning, special handling, or shipping instructions and sales tax management.
- Acctivate’s purchasing management software is a repository of purchasing history information that can be accessed by all authorized company personnel. It streamlines the complexities of purchasing with dynamic purchasing management for requisitions, quotations, purchase orders, receiving and alerts.
- Acctivate's drop ship purchasing wizard is a powerful tool that automatically creates purchase orders for drop shipments from your vendor to your customer or special orders.
- Inventory control affects the entire business and your customers, not just your warehouse. Acctivate offers a variety of inventory features ranging from "catch weights" to "kitting & assemblies," "landed cost" to "matrix inventory" and serial, lot and expiration date tracking.
- Manufacturing capabilities include custom fabrication and process manufacturing. Vary bills-of materials by adding, removing or changing component parts or quantities, automatically maintaining traceability of lot/serial numbers for components and resultant finished products, and efficiently managing refurbishment or disassembly.
- Whether products are made to stock (assemblies), made on-demand (kitting) or a combination of the two, Acctivate controls the inventory and provides visibility on sales, margins, availability, and anticipated prices current and future component inventory requirements.
- Used in various industries such as apparel, jewelry, footwear, paint manufacturing, flooring, sporting goods—anywhere color, size, style, or pattern variations require complex matrix inventory control and tracking capabilities.
- Acctivate’s order fulfillment tools are designed to reduce errors, eliminate bottlenecks, optimize worker productivity and assist in the process of satisfying customers.
- Create, manage, control and monitor pricing decisions across the company by segment, product or customer with Acctivate.
- Acctivate supports leading barcoding hardware devices, scanners and printers. Its Mobile warehouse feature is an optional module.
- Acctivate's powerful lot number and serial number tracking capabilities, combined with Acctivate's barcoding functionality, form one of the most robust solutions for lot and serial number traceability.
- Acctivate is "international ready" supporting Landed Cost, Multi-currency and EDI compatibility.
- Acctivate also offers E-commerce integration with multiple web stores and marketplaces.
- Reporting and Analytics
- On-premises Platform or Cloud Options
As you can see from the list of features above, Acctivate adapts to increased demands and growth with a flexible and scalable design, not only supporting a virtually unlimited number of users, locally and globally, but enabling addition of new features without significant changes, to handle substantial growth or change in your business volume or structure.
Consider activating some enhancements to overcome the deficiencies in your inventory or warehouse management by stopping by the Acctivate booth in the conference exhibit hall. You also can point your browser to the Acctivate website for more information.
With DEAR by Cin7 (DEAR) you will get a big picture view of your business without losing sight of the details. DEAR makes enterprise-level inventory management, manufacturing, sales channel integration, reporting and more accessible to businesses of all sizes.
DEAR will provide you with instant visibility into your stock levels and orders, no matter how many different products or product locations you manage. DEAR takes you from clunky traditional software to the speed and intuitiveness of a cloud ERP application.
- Simplify the challenges of wholesale level product management.
- Tiered and custom pricing helps attract high-spending customers and price-conscious ones.
- Increase the speed and accuracy of your product picks with barcode scanning.
- Transfer your inventory across multiple locations while maintaining transfer costs and avoiding inventory surpluses or shortages.
- Inventory write-off functionality removes lost inventory value supporting accounting accuracy.
Save time and labor on every accounting process with DEAR inventory seamlessly connected to every aspect of your business.
- Choose your suppliers with confidence based on value and profit. DEAR provides comprehensive supplier information, powering intelligent decision-making and minimizing financial losses.
- Smart reordering forecasts future product sales and generates alerts to reorder products from merchants.
- The automated backorder feature ensures orders are fulfilled when stock arrives.
- Simplify purchase order management and gain back valuable time.
Consolidate all the features you need to manage sales across multiple channels in one platform with their order management features.
- Seamless integration with your other order management systems like your POS or eCommerce help you elevate your sales process.
- Accurate customer information enables sales, service and marketing teams to target specific customers and understand their needs.
- You will be in control of your inventory consolidation of incoming orders across all your sales channels, plus full visibility into current order statuses.
With the right data at your fingertips and powerful bills of material, cost-effective manufacturing DEAR will take your manufacturing to the next level.
Enjoy a 360-degree view of your production costs and inventory status so that you can make strategic business decisions informed by a wealth of data—like pricing strategies or loss reduction practices.
- Detailed Bill of Materials for your entire inventory and sub-assemblies are simple, giving you a true picture of raw materials, labor and overhead costs.
- Embark on projects with complete certainty over manufacturing costs and raw material availability. Finished Goods feature provides visibility into material levels and associated costs, as well as automatically ordering missing components.
DEAR offers more than just eCommerce inventory management—it provides a comprehensive solution that connects every sales channel, system and process. This means you will benefit from strategic elements like supplier analysis and financial summaries as well as crucial day-to-day features like purchase orders, barcode scanning or batch recalls.
- Streamline and simplify your fulfillment stage by automating the Pick, Pack and Ship steps for every sales channel. From receiving an order to fulfilling the order to your customer, you can complete the entire process automatically.
- As the orders roll in, rest assured that every transaction is seamlessly synchronized in real-time across all of your sales channels.
- Centralize all coupons and discounts to keep track of your branding image and customer loyalty, which will help you drive sales.
DEAR integrates seamlessly with QuickBooks and Xero so you can remove the hassle of accounting data entry. DEAR does the hard work for you—automatically creating entries and syncing invoices, bills, payments, and more, straight to the app in a single click.
- Run your business on actual accounting costing methods for true cost calculations using FIFO or FEFO methods. You inventory also can use serial/batch numbers and expiration dates to store unique items and track inventory sales to specific end customers.
- DEAR makes it simple to access the financial information you need via a comprehensive reporting module. When you need to know product figures, simply view and export the relevant financial reports at any time.
Don't just stand there staring into the headlights while your outdated inventory system runs over you, head over to the DEAR by Cin7 booth in the exhibit hall to check out what a modern ERP app can do for you. You also can learn more by visiting the DEAR website.
Acknowledgements and Disclosures:
Portions of this feature, including graphical artwork contained therein, have been adapted from content used from the vendor (sponsor) websites (or other related sources) of the various sponsors (vendors) discussed within this feature. All such source materials within this feature by Insightful Accountant were adapted and are furnished solely for educational purposes.
As used herein, QuickBooks refers to one or more registered trademarks of Intuit Inc., a publicly-traded corporation headquartered in Mountain View, California. Intuit QuickBooks and the QuickBooks ProAdvisor Program are proud sponsors of Insightful Accountant's 2022 Top 100 ProAdvisor and the ProAdvisor of the Year Awards.
"Scaling New Heights" is a registered trade name of Woodard Events LLC of Canton, Georgia. "Scaling New Heights" is a proud sponsor of Insightful Accountant's 2022 Top 100 ProAdvisor and the ProAdvisor of the Year Awards.
Any other trade names used herein, including those of the sponsors (vendors) featured within this article, refer to products that may be registered, trademarked, or otherwise held by their respective owners; they are referenced for informational and educational purposes only.
This is an editorial feature, not sponsored content. None of the vendors within this article have paid Insightful Accountant or the author any form of remuneration to be included within this feature. The article is provided solely for informational and educational purposes.
The publication of this article, nor the inclusion of this product within the related series, does not represent any endorsement by either the author or Insightful Accountant.
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