QBO App First Look: shopVox

by

Do you have a small metal fabrication shop among your clients?  How about a company that does custom printing or graphic design?  Maybe you have a client who builds and installs playground equipment. Maybe your client does the custom engraving awards for Insightful Accountant’s Top 10 Awards?

One of the growing segments of the small business community is ‘shops’ that design, build, fabricate or perform work that is has a relatively quick turn around time.  The problem is that while each shop order maybe short-term, there are hundreds of them to track.

QuickBooks Online can account for the costs and revenues and even the materials used, but it was never designed to track the work flow of one shop order after another.  This is where shopVox comes in handy. 

ShopVox is cloud-based workflow software to help all kinds of shops get the work done on time.  It gives you the ability to schedule and manage your shop orders and product so that you never miss the deadline or ‘promise date’ you have given your customer.

Once you connect shopVox to QuickBooks Online1 you will be able to use shopVox as your CRM to keep customer information organized. You can connect shopVox to your Gmail inbox and configure remainders and alerts to insure you stay connected with your best customers.

ShopVox even lets you build a custom sales pipeline to help you turn leads into paying customers.

Now that you have that customer just where you want him, in your shop, you can create a detailed estimate using the tools you need to expedite quote delivery.

Of course, you can always make use of the shopVox Quick Quote feature if you have a client asking for a price over the telephone.  Then manage your Quotes with alerts and reminders to help turn every estimate into a job-in-progress.

You have lucked out all around, that last quote you emailed was quickly followed up by the customer calling to give you the go ahead. So, it’s easy to turn quotes into Sales Orders.

Of course, you already checked the production calendar to ensure that you could meet the promised deadline you gave your customer.

And you are ready to get the sales order set-up in the production schedule. It’s easy with shopVox because this software was designed with intelligent job boards that allow you to manage your jobs with drag-n-drop whenever there are conflicts. You will create individual job tickets that provide the full specs of each job along with the work and machine requirements.

Then manage your production with drag-n-drop ease if you find that you either need to move-up, move-back, or realign the work.

You will find that you have quickly completed the work at hand because you have everything so organized with shopVox. Now it’s time to invoice your customer and it’s easy to turn your production results into the finished invoice based upon the initial sales order. 

You can even take payments right inside of shopVox with the optional authorize.net payment gateway feature.  When you are connected to QBO you will easily sync all the sales information over so that you never have to do double-entry work again.

And connecting to QuickBooks Online is easy. Once you have set-up your shopVox account simply to the Account Settings link for your shopVox store and Enable QuickBooks Online. You will be take to where you can sign-in to your QBO account and go through the standard ‘OAuth’ authorization process Intuit uses to link all 3rd party applications to QuickBooks Online.

After the initial connection, there are some configurations settings that need to be set-up between the two applications these include how you want shopVox transactions coded within QBO, how sales tax should post, payment methods, customer terms, and some others. 

I don’t intend to take the time to go through all of these in detail because shopVox provides some very detailed instructions on your configuration options and mapping procedures.

ShopVox works well with QuickBooks. So much so that they have been selected as one of the 10 finalists in Intuit’s $100,000 App Showdown. The winner will be announced at QuickBooks Connect next week.

I haven't tried to cover all that shopVox does, I mean it also has purchase orders and materials handling along with receiving and materials requests, but remember this was just a 'first look' feature. 

If you want more information about shopVox check-out either the Intuit App Center shopVox webpage, or the shopVox website where you can set-up a trial-run, a product demonstration, or visit with a shopVox team member.

Footnote(s):

1- shopVox also offers connectivity with QuickBooks Desktop versions.