I told you in February that Insightful Accountant would bring back "Warehouse Wednesdays." I also said it would not be an every Wednesday feature, but a regular series returning to the headlines of Insightful Accountant.
The series will cover inventory, warehouse management, shipping, e-commerce and related topics as in past years. Since our readership has evolved, and more of our readers are using online accounting platforms like QuickBooks Online, we will focus more on solutions geared toward the cloud environment.
Accordingly, this week’s "Warehouse Wednesday" is designed to provide you with an overview of erplain Sales and Inventory.
erplain is a user-friendly online inventory and order management app for small- to medium-size businesses. The app helps eliminate time-consuming processes that make inventory management painful and riddled with mistakes.
- Sales and Purchases will automatically update stock levels across multiple locations
- Manage product pricing with price levels and price rules
- Easily create stock adjustments to enter, remove or relocate inventory
- Access accurate and real-time stock-level information
- Avoid stock-outs using automated reorder points
- Track Lot-numbers and Expiration-dates
Currently, erplain has a 4.5 rating on the Intuit QuickBooks App Store based upon 52 reviews, with 37 of the 52 reviewers giving erplain a 5-star rating.
Features and Functionality
erplain provides a wealth of features and functionalities not found in QuickBooks Online, but integrates with QBO.
Order Management
- All Customer History, Estimates, Sales Orders, Shipping and Invoices are conveniently located together.
- Configure Estimates to provide customers with complete cost quotes.
- Sales orders reserve inventory until shipped/delivered. QuickBooks Online does not include a sales order feature. Using erplain you can create sales orders and make full or partial shipments as needed.
- Create Purchase Orders from Sales Orders to optimize inventory levels. erplain includes robust purchasing and receiving functions to support the inventory management capabilities.
- Order management — partial shipment, drop shipment, product return control. An essential part of order management includes receiving and returns. erplain includes effective controls related to the posting of stock to inventory based upon receiving against purchases and product returns.
- Invoices in erplain are very similar to those in QuickBooks Online. When you enter an invoice in erplain, it will synchronize to QBO. This means if you create an invoice from a partially fulfilled Sales order in erplain, it will create an invoice in QBO upon the next synchronization.
- Find all your pending invoices in seconds, valued in the currency appropriate for the transaction. erplain handles multi-currency without any problem at all.
Product Management
- SKUs, barcodes, descriptions and supplier references — Easily track supplier references per item capturing supplier part numbers and costs.
- Product variants and categories — Some products have variants based upon attributes or even multiple attributes. For example, color and size. erplain provides for the effective management of these items.
- Omni-channel product tracking — ecommerce, POS and EDI integrations often require item definitions to be conformed in a manner that the same item can be tracked across all platforms. erplain provides effective management capabilities for matching items on an omni-channel basis.
Multiple stock locations and multiple price levels
- Track inventory levels, forecast products per site, and everything in real time. erplain supports multiple locations, allowing you to see how much inventory is in each of your facilities and purchase and receive materials at each location.
- Store and sell products from various sites — You can expedite customer deliveries by controlling shipments since you now will be able to fulfill orders by shipping from one or more locations.
- Quickly transfer inventory between locations — The convenient transfer of raw materials and finished goods between sites allows you to manage your business more effectively.
- Manage inventory by bin locations for storage.
- Effective outgoing order and product returns processing.
- Establish retail and wholesale price levels — erplain allows you to have different pricing structures for other customers and quantity-based pricing. For example, you might have both wholesale and retail pricing. The option to use price levels or override a price option can be made at the time of any sales transaction.
- Manage sales and discounting with product price rules — erplain also allows you to have "special" pricing for specific customers who would typically be subject to retail pricing, or you might want to offer "sale pricing" at certain times of the year.
- Margin and best sales analytics.
- Weighted Average Cost per Unit (cost valuation methodology).
- Multi-currency support.
B2B E-commerce Store and related functionality
- B2B E-commerce — Online store for self-ordering.
- Trace products using batch, lot numbers, and expiration dates — Lot tracking is used to track a specific item's batches or groups. Lot numbers stay with the batch. You can track when each batch was received, sold and shipped. In addition, erplain can set an expiration date for lots, and track when lot items expire and should no longer be available for sale.
- Barcode scanner(s) support.
- Create Assemblies, Kits and Bundles — erplain gives users the ability to track assemblies and kits. A kit is a collection of items that are bundled together at the time of purchase or sale. These individual items are separate items and still can be sold individually if needed. In contrast, an assembly is an item created from component items. While the quantity of finished inventory assembly items increase the inventories of the component items decrease as they are used to create the assembly.
- Support for Shopify and Shopify POS.
erplain Point-of-Sale
- erplain POS in an application for iPad and iPhone for in-store transactions.
- Find products, process sales and print receipts.
- All product and inventory management is performed in the related erplain account.
- erplain POS syncs with the corresponding erplain account to centralize inventory and sales across all sales channels (Retail, Wholesale, Online, etc.).
Integration with QuickBooks Online
- erplain users need QuickBooks Online Plus to sync products, invoices and purchase orders between the two solutions.
- erplain imports and synchronizes your Customers and Suppliers with QuickBooks in real-time.
- erplain synchronizes products, inventory, price and reorder points with QuickBooks.
- Sync Invoices and Purchase Orders to QuickBooks as if they had been created natively, but with erplain functionalities (locations, price levels, sales orders, kitting, etc.).
Pricing
erplain offers a variety of pricing options depending on your business inventory requirements. Be sure to speak with an erplain representative regarding the various plans before signing up.
NOTE: Pricing information is provided for the readers’ convenience. Insightful Accountant makes no assurance that the prices reflected are accurate at the time of publication or when the reader is referencing the article (they were valid when the article content was being researched). Readers should review the website for current pricing information.
Various pricing plans are available for erplain, and plans can be paid for monthly or annually. Features, functions, options and capabilities will vary significantly from one plan to another. Readers should thoroughly review and understand any plan they select before entering into any subscription for service.
erplain offers a "trial plan," which may be of benefit before subscribing for service. “When in doubt, check it out with a free trial run.”
Conclusion
erplain provides QuickBooks Online with sales and inventory functionalities it otherwise doesn’t have. You can create sales orders to commit inventory and purchase orders from those sales orders to optimize your inventory to fulfill a drop-shipment.
You can manage your inventory with sophisticated price rules and levels, avoid stock-outs with re-order points, and track lot numbers and expiration dates. These are just some of the inventory and sales capabilities erplain offers.
But the times are changing, and that’s why erplain also supports in-shop point-of-sale with its own POS offering and B2B E-commerce and Shopify capabilities. So, whether you are in wholesale, retail, E-commerce or any other aspect of sales and inventory working with QuickBooks Online, check out erplain Sales and Inventory.
Acknowledgments and Disclosures:
Content used within this feature was derived or adapted by the author in-part from erplain source materials. Graphics used herein were adapted from erplain sources including the erplain website. Adapted or derived source materials published by Insightful Accountant within this feature are for educational and product promotional purposes only.
erplain, as used herein, refers to one or more registered trademarks of erplain, a privately held company located in the Tarmac incubateur of Meylan, Grenoble, France, with North American Headquarters located in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.
As used herein, QuickBooks® and QuickBooks Online refer to one or more registered trademark products of Intuit Inc., a publicly-traded corporation (Nasdaq: INTU) headquartered in Mountain View, California.
Shopify eCommerce and Shopify POS are a proprietary e-commerce platform for on-line stores and a retail point-of-sale system operating under trademarks registered to Shopify, a Canadian multinational ecommerce company headquartered in Ottawa, Ontario.
Various other trade names used herein, if any, may refer specifically to registered trademark products held by their respective owners. They are used solely for informational and educational purposes.
This is an editorial feature, not sponsored content. None of the vendors within this article have paid Insightful Accountant or the author any remuneration to be included in this feature. The article is provided solely for informational and educational purposes.
The publication of this article does not represent any endorsement by either the author or Insightful Accountant.
Note: Registered Trademark ® symbols have been eliminated from the articles within this publication for brevity due to the frequency or abundance with which they would otherwise appear or be repeated. We attempt to credit such trademarked products within our respective article footnotes and disclosures.
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