November is Inventory and Manufacturing Month at Insightful Accountant. In this article we will examine All Orders by Number Cruncher, a robust-feature-rich inventory solution that does light manufacturing.
All Orders by NumberCruncher is a QuickBooks add-on that delivers robust, feature-rich inventory management, sales cycle workflow, and warehouse management solutions at an affordable price. Key features include:
- Seamlessly Integrated with QuickBooks - robust bi-directional synchronization, updates to entities, such as items and customers, that occur in one system will always roll into the other. No need to enter anything twice! Whenever QuickBooks needs to get notified of items going into inventory, such as receiving or out of stock, such as shipping, All Orders will make sure QuickBooks knows about it. Bookkeepers handling AR/AP in QuickBooks cannot even tell the difference between documents generated by actual users or All Orders! (Note: All Orders allows you to either sync the items in QuickBooks or use aliases. If you sync the items, you will see them on all transactions; you can still print invoices from QuickBooks, print sales reports, and use other integrated applications that require items in QuickBooks. In addition, with All Orders, you will see a detailed breakdown of inventory by item, location, bin, and serial #, whereas in QuickBooks, you will see the total quantity only.)
- Custom User Interface Dashboards - user interface designed with visual cues everywhere, helping users find what they are looking for. The Home Dashboard is a unique launch screen that serves as a handy one-stop collection of often-accessed lists and forms. One-click access to popular sales, purchasing, production, and warehouse functions, plus quick reports, make this the starting point for many users.
- Customer Details and Follow-up (CRM) functionalities - customer information screen provides a complete history of every transaction for each customer. Combined with searching and filtering, staff can easily find quotes, orders, shipments and return and open them for viewing or editing with a single click. This screen includes the customer contact details, internal notes on the customer, and an A/R Aging summary for their account. In addition, shortcut buttons are available for quick reordering of products, duplicating quotes and orders, and opening new transactions for the customer.
- Entire Sales Cycle Control: Quotations, Sales Orders, Pick and Shipping/Delivery Process - All Orders provides documents to cover the Sales Cycle. Quotes can be issued to customers and then easily converted into Sales Orders. Orders can then be filled with shipping documents (or electronically via the 'mobile' App) which prompt the pick, pack, and ship/delivery process, culminating in an invoice being generated in QuickBooks. RMAs and Customer Returns can be prepared, when needed, to complete the Sales Cycle.
- Customer Order Fulfillment Process with flexibility - sales orders can have multiple shipping/delivery and release dates, which means no more entering numerous sales orders to fulfill multiple delivery dates. Instead, you can maintain multiple ship-to addresses for each customer and ship/deliver to multiple addresses from the same sales order. In addition, the Batch Shipper feature will auto allocate available inventory to customer orders and create shipping documents on the fly, allowing you to select which orders get stock first, date ranges to filter orders to ship/deliver, and specify customers or locations for shipping/delivery. You can even manually override allocated inventory to pick and choose which orders get shipped, all without creating 'inventory count, price or cost' irregularities in the software.
- Counter Orders and Payments - All Orders can service your Point-of-sale requirements and take orders and accept payments on customer orders at a counter. You can assign special terms to customers that require payments to be taken when orders are placed or upon shipping. Apply payment methods such as checks, wires, or credit cards, and enter other relevant payment information. All Orders will make sure the payments are recorded in QuickBooks and applied to all relevant documents. You can even process credit cards through your existing gateway and merchant account. Attach a USB card reader and use the built-in swipe function for your point-of-sale counter transactions.
- Sophisticated Pricing - with advanced price levels you can set company-wide discounts, customer-specific discounts, create customer-specific price catalogs, configure customer-specific discounts by item category, set markups, define item-specific volume discounts, and many more options. You will be able to configure an almost unlimited number of price levels for sales at different times of the year or by customer types. You can easily give customers special pricing on orders by overriding the assigned price levels of items with a new price on an either an item-by-item or order-by-order basis. You can even set up rounding preferences, so that prices always come out looking just the way you want them to look.
- Purchase and Inventory Cycle Management - Quickly create Purchase Orders and print/email. Receive them into stock using either Receiving Documents or a Mobile Application, which fully supports barcodes, bins, and lot and serial numbers. Sync them to QuickBooks when complete to create the Vendor Bill. Run receiving reports to track and manage your receiving. Make Vendor Returns and sync those to QuickBooks for Vendor Credits. Set-up multiple vendors for each item using the Preferred Vendors list where you can specify the vendor's part number, UPC, cost, lead time, and more. Each item can also have a default vendor.
- FIFO / Specific Identification Costing - QuickBooks uses the weighted average cost to record the cost of goods sold and inventory value on the balance sheet. However, when there are numerous fluctuations in cost or you want to trace a certain purchase to a specific invoice, the weighted average cost may not be appropriate. So All Orders uses a 'parallel ledger,' whereby FIFO or specific identification can be used for costing, while QuickBooks will continue to use weighted average cost.
- Cycle Counting - Cycle counting functionality in All Orders allows companies to quickly and easily print count sheets and record physical inventories or cycle counts in a timely and efficient manner.
- Cost Accounting and Vendor Pricing - All Orders can be a valuable cost accounting tool, assisting with complex costing and pricing decisions. It can calculate markup and margin using the 'Purchase Cost.' Additionally, you can view costs for parts only, non-parts only, or both.
- Automated Purchase Orders - The Reorder Analysis screen will automate the process of creating Purchase Orders in batch based on items falling below reorder points or orders needing inventory. Purchases may be created one at a time or in batch. Work orders and sales orders that depend on purchase orders can also be tracked. All Orders maintains a complete history of receiving and returned transactions on purchase orders. The reorder analysis enables you to create batch purchase orders or work orders for multiple vendors and items simultaneously. The reorder analysis works with multiple vendors by item, so you can get the information you need.
- Reorder Points and Lead times - The right reorder point can reduce backorder scenarios and inventory carrying costs. QuickBooks has reorder points, but they are static. However, constantly changing product life cycles and seasonal trends require a more dynamic way to calculate and re-calculate reorder points. All Orders uses sales and usage history along with lead times to calculate reorder points. So, even if you don't know the lead times, All Orders will calculate lead times based on receiving history.
- Receiving and Returns - Receiving and returns can also be managed through All Orders, including inventory and non-inventory items. You can receive directly from a purchase order or the receiving screen, print receiving and return logs, and record bills and credit memos into QuickBooks. All Orders' receiving form allows bar code scanning, which automatically adds the item to the receiving list. As an alternative, you can enter lot /serial # from the receiving form to initiate returns or receiving.
- Repair Orders - RMA and Repair Order functionality allows you to track and link multiple activities and transactions together. These activities include documenting the problem, issuing an RMA or Repair Quote, checking the warranty, reviewing repair history, receiving the product from the customer, assigning a technician to evaluate and work on the problem, issuing a vendor return or replacement sales order, and returning the product and/or invoicing the customer (when applicable).
- Multiple Warehouses and Locations/Bins - All Orders' location tracking feature allows you to follow the movement of inventory from and between locations such as multiple warehouses, direct shipments to customers or vendors, and consignment inventory or components sub-contractors. All Orders lets you assess summary or detailed item information by location. In addition to multiple warehouses, All Orders supports 'Bins,' a physical container, shelf, room, area, or virtual location. This enables locations within locations so that you can have items in multiple Bins.
- Lot/Serial Number Tracking - All Orders includes full support for managing lot and serial numbers. Items specified for lot or serial number tracking, will have every transaction coded via an entry screen where new lot or serial numbers can be input into stock, and existing ones are removed. Quickly generate new numbers, print labels with or without barcodes, scan and enter them and their expiration dates, import and export as required, and do much more!
- Bar code Printing & Scanning - All Orders allows you to print bar code labels for items directly from the source transactions—no other software is required. It comes pre-loaded with Avery Labels, but you can design your label to work with any Windows printer. You can also scan bar codes directly into the database. All Orders will recognize the item's part number, UPC, Vendor part number, or manufacturer's part number.
- All Orders Production Features - provides complex Bills of Materials (BoM) to specify the different stages of production that need to be tracked and assign the components to be used at each stage of the production process. You can nest sub-assemblies to create multi-level BOMs with an unlimited level of details. You can even use Phantom BOMs to configure complex assemblies to be broken down into easy to manage sub-assemblies that can be flattened during production. Advanced production tracking features include work orders and disassembly functionality, batch processing is supported, along with streamlined repair orders and Return Material (RMA) Authorization processing.
- All Orders Mobile for Warehouse Management - All Orders Mobile extends All Orders functionality onto Windows-based Mobile' hand-held' Computers to make your warehouse operations more efficient! The application allows these hand-held computers to connect wirelessly to your All Orders database and download sales orders to be picked, purchase orders to be received, and counts. Once a sales order is picked, the picking information will be uploaded in real-time back to the All Orders database and automatically create Shipping or Delivery Documents. Similarly, once a purchase order is received through All Orders Mobile, the information will be uploaded to All Orders, and a Receiver will automatically be created. Finally, All Orders Mobile will update your count in All Orders with new quantities when it comes time to make inventory counts. (All Orders Mobile is a separate 'software module' that works with All Orders.)
- Forecasting - All Orders has a robust forecasting feature that helps you plan production, purchasing, and inventory levels. You import your sales forecast for a specified number of months, and All Orders will calculate your production needs, drill down into your multi-level bills of material and calculate your purchasing needs. The forecast can also be used to monitor your inventory levels with visual indicators if you will be running short. Use the forecast module to run what-if scenarios like increases in sales order changes in lead times.
- Reports – All Orders can generate various robust reports to give you the information your business needs to make intelligent decisions. All reports are customizable, with the ability to choose which fields to print, as well as advanced filtering, grouping, and sorting options, and export to Excel, Access, Word, PDF, RTF, and HTML.
Conclusion
All Orders is a good solution for smaller companies that need more than QuickBooks Desktop can provide, even if you are using Enterprise with Advanced Inventory enabled including Multiple sites, Serial/lots, Barcodes and Site Operations. In most cases All Orders simply does a better job at providing the same or additional functionality at competitive pricing to the Enterprise Diamond subscription product. All Orders is simple to use because of the interface which may actually turn some users off since it does not appear as sophisticated as some of the other products we will examine in this series. You might therefore conclude that All Orders could use a 'make over' from a cosmetic standpoint even though functionality is in line with what the product advertises it can do.