Katana is a modern manufacturing & inventory management software for small and mid-size scaling businesses. Its visual interface and smart real-time master planning allow to automate workflows, prioritize orders, and see the availability of raw materials & finished goods in real-time. In addition, the Shop Floor Control app provides insights into operations on the floor level. By offering a wide variety of native and third-party integrations, and an open API, Katana enables manufacturers to get an overview of the entire business. Consider it a ‘light manufacturing’ ERP with production scheduling and material inventory synchronized in one place. In addition, sales orders and purchase orders finalized in Katana are seamlessly synchronized to QuickBooks for accounting purposes.
- Smart priority-based production planning: real-time master production planner, sync sales orders from multiple channels into a single dashboard to plan and prioritize production. Never miss a delivery deadline; you will always be ahead of schedule. And speaking of schedule, that is exactly what Katana calls their production planning tool, 'The Schedule'. 'The Schedule' organizes your workshop or factory because it lists the Manufacturing Orders you have in order of priority.
- Production personnel always work on Manufacturing Orders from the top of the list and work their way down 'The Schedule', but you can amend the schedule by simple drag-and-drop of orders based on need. With Shop Floor Control, the production team can see and complete tasks, report consumed ingredients and manufactured products which modify the Schedule, we will discuss that later in this article.
- Track inventory in real-time: automatically allocate available material and finished products to fulfill orders, prioritize your schedule, so you see what’s important. End-to-end traceability, batch/lot numbers, and expiry date tracking. Katana has perpetual inventory because all stock movements are completely automatic in real-time based on your purchasing, making, and selling activities.
- Katana displays 'in-stock,' 'committed,' 'expected,' and 'missing/excess' quantities for every item in inventory. This may take some getting use to if you have been using the simplistic 'counting' of QuickBooks. Each of these count types has a variety of factors that impact the quantities being reported, and you will see changes occur in real-time as transactions and productions occur.
- Katana tracks manufacturing costs based on your bill of materials (BOM), ensuring accurate costing in your production operations.
- Like QuickBooks (Desktop), Katana supports the Average Cost method of inventory costing. This, of course, differs from the cost method used by QuickBooks Online. As such, it may be preferable if you are considering a transition from QuickBooks Desktop to QuickBooks Online to migrate your inventory into Katana rather than QuickBooks Online, then sync Katana to a QBO Company file without Inventory so that QuickBooks reflects the 'value' of Average Cost Inventory reported by Katana. [Note: This reports both facts from the manufacturer and reflects a recommendation based upon the writer's opinion.]
- Shop Floor Control provides insights into floor-level operations with direct access to product tasks and ingredient lists for manufacturing orders.
- The Shop Floor Control App is a mobile-friendly web-based App for the shop floor's production team to manage assigned tasks. It provides each assigned production team member, known as an 'operator', with a list of assigned production tasks. While the Shop Floor Control App can be accessed from any acceptable device, it only enables an individual 'operator' (assigned user) to see, start, stop, pause, quit, and complete any/all tasks that have been assigned to that operator. The status of those tasks are immediately reflected on the Katana MRP site automatically in real-time.
- Automate invoice and purchase orders/bills with QuickBooks integration. Create Invoices in QuickBooks based on Sales Orders in Katana with a click of a button. Create Vendor Bills in QuickBooks based on Purchase Orders in Katana with a click of a button.
- When Katana is connected to QuickBooks Online, an 'Invoice' column appears on the 'Sell' screen. Selecting 'Create invoice' for any Sales Order will create a matching Customer Invoice in QuickBooks. The Invoice status will change to "Invoiced created in QuickBooks" within Katana. Invoicing status cannot be reverted to not-invoiced in Katana; however, deleting an Invoice in QuickBooks will revert the status in Katana to no longer being invoiced.
- Katana offers numerous integrations with eCommerce platforms and marketplaces for those users who want to use the platform to control inventory for eCommerce. They also provide various other integrations via Zapier and allow users to build their own integrations by offering an ‘open API.’
- eCommerce platforms and marketplace integrations include: Shopify (Native), WooCommerce (Native), Amazon (3rd-party), CartRover (3rd-party), Etsy (3rd-party), BigCommerce (3rd-party), eBay (3rd-party), Ecwid (3rd-party), Magento (3rd-party), Shift4Shop (3rd-party), Squarespace (3rd-party), and Wix (3rd-party).
Katana is suitable for Apparel, Electronics & high-tech, Entertainment products, Food & Beverage, Health & Beauty, Home & Garden, Machinery & Equipment, Paper & packaging, Pet food & supplies, Sporting goods, Toys, and other manufacturing/production applications.
You will find Katana listed on the Intuit QuickBooks App Store HERE. Katana offers a 14-day free trial. They also offer a Partner Program for Accounting Pros and Manufacturing Experts who want to implement Katana with their clients on a co-marketing basis.