QBO App First Look: Locate Inventory

by

Locate Inventory is a new cloud-based inventory solution that has recently been posted to the Intuit App Center. This product integrates with both QuickBooks Online, which is why it’s in the App Center and QuickBooks Desktop. 

Locate Inventory, a product of FBP Inc., which I will just call Locate, has a lot of features that make it seem like some of the bigger ERP systems. Yet, it has a very fundamental feel and look that most SMBs will appreciate.

For example, let’s look at customers. Obviously, you need the ability to capture all the information you want concerning your customers, whether you fulfill inventory orders directly from your own stock or via a supplier’s stock. 

You can create customers and enter their contact information, including delivery locations as you take orders. Locate gives you the ability to customize your customer profiles with custom fields of information and illustrations. You can set customer credit limits and even bring in your customer balances from QuickBooks.

Need to process customer returns? Locate has a feature for that. One of the things that's really neat is its ability to perform address verification for customers and orders.

But you need to use that customer information for some reason, right? Of course, your preferred reason would be "sales." Locate gives you the tools to do that. 

So, let’s look at Sales Orders:

Locate gives you the ability to leverage the power of your inventory data with Sales Order prioritization and work assignments that follow rules designed to generate the best workflow for your operation. 

It is designed to maximize inventory efficiency and have your team effectively processing orders, rather than waiting around to see “what’s up” with a specific order.

In case you're wondering why this app is called Locate, I think it's because the developers provided tremendous search capabilities to make your work easier. You can search for Sales Orders using standard fields like order number, customer, account number, part name, part number, carrier, status, fulfillment site, fulfillment date and issue date. 

If that isn’t enough, you can also search by shipping or billing addresses, order custom fields, and more.

You will always be on top of your inventory status, orders in progress and work with Locate’s dashboard.

By the way, did I mention integrations? Not only does Locate integrate with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, but it presently integrates with more than 15 other products, including Ecommerce platforms like Magento, Shopify, BigCommerce and 3dcart.

You can also connect to UPS, FedEx, ShipStation and Endicia. Locate also supports Authorize.net.

Of course, what would an inventory system be without inventory capabilities. Locate is certainly well configured when it comes to this criticality. You can not only track the usual item types, but a series of advanced part types, including part aliases, bundled parts, configurable parts, collections, assembly build parts and other light manufacturing components.

Make certain you're never without the inventory you need with reorder quantities and rules designed to keep your stock just where you want it. Locate offers flexible tracking by serial number, expiration date and even custom tracking types. 

More and more consigned or supplier on-hand inventories are being used in e-commerce operations, which is why Locate gives you the ability to track your inventory at vendor sites, as well as all of your locations. Then, you can easily process inventory transfers when locations change.

You can keep track of part rentals or trade show samples as well. There won’t be any doubts about inventory locations, because you can always view your inventory by part, location or order.

Locate even has a feature that will help you reorganize your inventory locations, based upon sale history in order to maximize order fulfillment efficiency.

But sooner or later, it's time to restock your stock. And, as I mentioned, Locate has a feature to help you order when it's time to order.

Locate also gives you the ability to automatically generate purchase orders from drop-ship line items on your sales orders. It can also generate Purchase Orders automatically when a sales order results in inventory falling below your established minimum criteria. 

You can easily manage vendor company and contact information and outsourced bills of materials for custom work you specify on purchase orders. Locate also has a function to merge purchase orders when you want or need to consolidate orders.

It will eventually be time within your inventory workflow to fulfill all those orders you have been taking from your customers. That means somebody must do the work of getting the order ready to go out the door. 

With Locate, you'll find you no longer need to pick orders based solely upon a process that works through one order after another. Locate offers a variety of picking options based on customer, part, orders, shipping locations or any number of other pick workflows.

Just because you picked orders for fulfillment doesn’t mean they're fulfilled. You need to prepare them for shipping and/or delivery and get them picked up by the shipper or put on the delivery truck. Locate has workflows that help track the entire process from pick, to pack, to ship or deliver. 

And did I mention options for these workflows? Locate can give you dynamic pick plans based on FIFO and FEFO. They even have a feature for palletizing multiple cartons for shipping delivery. 

Another feature that will speed up both fulfillment, along with receiving and put-away, is automated print events for shipping and barcoding.

But you're probably reading this article because you use QuickBooks, right? And what you want to know is how it works with QBO or QBD, correct? 

First, I want you to know that even though Locate works with QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop, it still has its own detailed Ledger and Chart of Accounts that get mapped to your QuickBooks configuration as part of set up. 

This internal ledger makes it easy to reconcile between Locate and QuickBooks as well as identify any discrepancy that might occur between the two systems.  

But Locate also understands the reason that many SMBs need to migrate to an inventory system outside of QuickBooks is because of the "bloating effect" that inventory centric businesses have upon either QBO or QBD. 

The more sophisticated the inventory requirements within QuickBooks, the quicker your QB becomes taxed by the number of items, locations and transactions. 

Even other third-party inventory add-ons can tax QuickBooks in just a couple of years, because they continue to pump all the details into the accounting. But Locate has taken a different approach. It retains all the details of your transactions and posts a single journal entry each day into either QuickBooks Online or QuickBooks Desktop. 

So, I know what you're thinking – "If my accounting is in QuickBooks and my details are in Locate, can I get the information I need from Locate?"

Of course. Reports are vital to your inventory-centric SMB, and Locate has the reports you need. With a robust library of reports, you can quickly extract and analyze large amounts of data using some significant reporting capabilities like reporting on any number or set of specific parts, orders, customers, vendors or even shipping details. 

It’s easy to filter and customize reports using the various custom fields you set up.

Another great feature is the ability to customize report profiles for each Locate user, so that you control what reports a user has access to and in what format they can access those reports. 

Maybe some users only need the information in a few columns, while others need the same report, but different columns of information. And yet others may need all the columns. You can define exactly what your users get in the way of reporting.

If you're interested in learning more about Locate, here is the link to their website. While Locate is listed within the Intuit QuickBooks App Center here, you can only sign up or link up from Locate’s website at present.

The pricing information for this SAAS APP (software) is posted on the Intuit App site. Some SMBs may consider the monthly subscription price high, but when you think about the features you're getting and the fact you don’t have any initial capitalization for the cost of software purchase, it may fit into your overall budgetary requirements.