Inventory Management Made Easy: Avoid Manual QuickBooks Imports

Many startups initially perform manual QuickBooks imports to integrate inventory data with financials. But as a company grows and/or starts adding sales channels, this method becomes time-consuming and error-prone. So, it must find a solution that manages inventory outside of QuickBooks.

Various inventory management solutions exist in the QuickBooks partner ecosystem. They typically have easy setup processes and claim to sync well with QuickBooks’ accounting features. But this approach still has problems because it often results in multiple systems that don’t communicate well.

Consequently, businesses must bridge the gaps across those solutions with spreadsheets, emails, and manual work. And creating logical functionality out of multiple inventory management systems takes enormous effort.

For example, a company might launch using QuickBooks and Shopify and fill orders with a third-party logistics (3PL) provider. It then needs another system to manage inventory information when it adds an online marketplace channel. All these systems must be synched with the 3PL while staff monitors everything for errors.

Many companies operate like this, adding system workarounds and hiring more people to manage mounting manual processes. And it gets hard to track the time wasted on manual processes, the data entry errors made, and the lack of operational visibility impacting the bottom lines.

Yet, business operations don’t have to be this painful. Many companies wisely invest in a comprehensive system that combines accounting, inventory management, and more in a single data model. The software simplifies processes and eliminates manual workarounds or point solution additions.

Let’s explore the key challenges companies face with an “inventory management solution + QuickBooks combo.” We’ll also discuss why moving to NetSuite’s cloud ERP helps companies avoid early software missteps, grow faster, and achieve scalable success.

Outgrowing a Starter System

QuickBooks may be a logical and economical choice for a starter system that handles a company’s accounting needs. For example, a business can use it to establish an accounts chart and manage vendors and customers through accounts payable and accounts receivable, respectively. 

However, QuickBooks doesn’t handle inventory. It houses no information about the merchandise available to sell, items ordered, or products en route. And inventory positions are reconciled at month’s end in QuickBooks. So, there’s no real-time snapshot of what teams can sell and what they’ve promised customers.

The disconnect between accounting and inventory control causes inaccurate sales projections, an inability to pinpoint revenue sources, and poor inventory allocation.

A company with a small amount of inventory might be able to handle manual QuickBooks imports for inventory and order data. But as that company’s stock-keeping units (SKU) count rises, order volumes and/or sales channels will expand. Then tracking inventory and fixing the errors from multiple data entries will become costly and time-consuming. That means the company will need a QuickBooks add-on solution from vendors like SkuVault, Shopify, Stitch Labs, Skubana, or TradeGecko to manage inventory.

Taking the Path of Least Resistance

New companies are typically eager to get up and running quickly, so they often implement individual inventory solutions. Yet, somehow, they still end up tracking inventory with spreadsheets, hunting for information in emails, and maintaining integrations between multiple solutions. These solutions “sync” with QuickBooks, but you must manually monitor the integration to avoid errors.

Organizations using this method must import inventory and order data into QuickBooks at month-end to ensure transactions post correctly to the general ledger.

This process can compound inventory and sales data inaccuracy as a company’s order volume grows, and it could require hours of manual labor to monitor and fix. Therefore, the disconnect between accounting and inventory control causes inaccurate sales projections, an inability to pinpoint revenue sources, and poor inventory allocation.

Issues arise because inventory solutions lack real-time integrations with QuickBooks. As a result, these systems require vigilance over the integration. It's an extra step companies can only avoid with a unified platform that eliminates as many connection points as possible.

Don’t Repeat Your Mistakes

Organizations know when they’ve outgrown QuickBooks. Once they receive a higher volume of orders, they realize this basic financial system can’t handle those processes without performing manual QuickBooks imports. Consequently, they can’t hire people fast enough to keep up.

Before long, companies must handle inventory with a patchwork of technology systems that: 

• Can’t scale to meet growing inventory management needs.
• Doesn’t connect directly with the company’s financial systems.
• Requires error-prone spreadsheets and too much manual effort.
• Is challenging to use because each solution has a different technology base, user experience, and functionality set. Navigating between solutions—often with manual steps in between—creates a poor user experience. (It also makes training new hires difficult and costly.)
• Lacks key capabilities (e.g., supply chain and warehouse management).
• Doesn’t provide granular data for sufficient analytics, reporting, and decision-making.

Companies encounter these and other problems and often conclude that they should implement a cloud-based ERP instead of looking for another point technology solution. Unfortunately, those that don’t opt for an ERP generally repeat this exercise every few years as their companies grow and their inventory management becomes more complex.

When Inventory Management Solutions Can’t Scale

When Topo Designs’ wholesale channel took off, the outdoor living apparel brand recognized that a lack of integration between QuickBooks and Stitch Labs wouldn’t support its growth.

Topo Designs also manages direct-to-consumer (D2C) sales on its website. And its Stitch Labs system limited the business’s ability to assess inventory levels across sales channels and plan future wholesale order fulfillment. The company would have had trouble scaling up operations because its software lacked order management and real-time key performance indicators (KPIs).

Ready for a change, Topo Designs switched to NetSuite’s cloud-based platform in 2019. Today, it has a unified view of its entire supply chain, allowing the company to prioritize order allocations based on inventory levels.

“One of the biggest challenges from our prior system setup was that we weren’t able to promise future purchase orders to future sales orders or allocate those sales orders to future purchase orders,” said Matt Williams, Operations and Finance Executive. He noted that this lack of visibility impacted how Topo Designs allocated available-to-sell inventory.

“There were inconsistencies in data between our D2C and B2B business. So, we were really looking for a system that would help centralize all that information and automate reporting,” said Hunter Leeming, Internal Operations Manager. “From the wholesale perspective, our business took off very quickly. We were getting big orders and needed to be EDI [electronic data interchange] compliant. Stitch Labs wasn’t able to support the size of the orders we were dealing with.”

You don’t need to be a large, established corporation to benefit from a unified business platform.

Topo Designs and Chubbies aren’t alone. Businesses using Shopify, QuickBooks, and inventory management solutions like Stitch Labs must often maintain integrations and double-check spreadsheets to ensure transaction accuracy. However, NetSuite houses inventory, order, customer, and financial data on a single system. Orders come in from e-commerce, marketplaces, or solutions built specifically for B2B wholesale ordering in real-time.

NetSuite also provides application program interfaces (APIs) and a partner ecosystem that maintains integrations for customers. In addition, the company vets SuiteCloud Developer Network (SDN) partners and Built for NetSuite solutions to ensure integrations are fully functional and adhere to NetSuite standards. It also requires SDN partners to keep solutions on the latest NetSuite release.

NetSuite offers industry-specific software editions created by wholesale distribution, manufacturing, and retail experts.

You don’t need to be a large, established corporation to benefit from a unified business platform. Some companies skip the Shopify + QuickBooks + inventory management step and install an ERP system first. That way, they avoid manual QuickBooks imports altogether.

A Matter of Supply Chain Scale and Sophistication

These problems don’t end with inventory management. Instead, they extend to the broader supply chain. The more channels and customers a company manages, the more sophisticated its supply chain must be. And the more complex a business is, the stronger the argument for adopting an ERP system early. 

As the companies above learned, moving from point system to point system can hamper an operation, limiting business opportunities and growth. Eventually, an organization must stop the insanity and move to a fully integrated business management platform.

Companies that ignore point system limitations struggle in today’s fast-paced online selling environment. Double-digit upticks in e-commerce sales currently pressure organizations to coordinate selling, inventory management, supply chain, and accounting simultaneously.

Wasted time goes hand-in-hand with growth limitations and impacts all functions, not just accounting. For example, many companies track manufacturing work in progress (WIP) on spreadsheets. Unfortunately, a single spreadsheet could include multiple versions of the same information, so users never know which is the most accurate. Therefore, businesses invest a lot of effort into manually updating these spreadsheets, wasting time, requiring added staff, and throttling company growth.

Companies that fear “giving up” existing point systems when implementing ERP can rest easy knowing that NetSuite also plays well with others.

QuickBooks is also a notoriously finicky system that doesn’t easily import or export data. And it requires users to constantly manipulate the actual data integration layer. Consequently, a company’s accountants are usually considered long-suffering heroes in these scenarios. They often spend up to six weeks manually reconciling records across multiple systems just to produce an accurate balance sheet.

Time for a Reliable Inventory Management Partner

For more than 20 years, NetSuite has provided peace of mind in a sector where many companies find software unpredictable. 

For example, an organization may think it has the right technology. Yet, the entire business will descend into chaos if one vendor goes out of business or stops supporting an application. 

Just look at Stitch Labs, which Square acquired in July 2020. After the acquisition, Stitch Labs stopped accepting new customers and sunsetted its inventory management product the following spring. Consequently, many companies scrambled for a replacement inventory management system amid a global pandemic and massive e-commerce sales spike.

Yet, a vendor doesn’t have to sunset a product or go out of business for companies to realize their inventory management platforms aren’t working. For many, reality hits while adding a new channel (i.e., wholesale or retail), forcing gaps in the existing systems to manifest as order errors, late shipments, and angry customers. Those organizations also lack clear visibility into their supply chains, so they must guess and estimate, which doesn’t cut it in today’s same-day/next-day delivery world.

In other situations, companies using Shopify + QuickBooks feel surprised when their basic accounting system can’t keep up with growing transaction volumes.

Many find managing new subsidiaries, new product lines, or new brands across multiple solutions incredibly painful. These efforts usually require a lot of manual QuickBooks imports. Yet, NetSuite handles all these functions (and more) with automation while eliminating the need for manual data entry.

Companies that fear “giving up” existing point systems when implementing ERP can rest easy knowing that NetSuite also plays well with others. It has a complete partner solutions ecosystem that extends its ERP platform’s functionality. So, you can keep systems like your e-commerce platform, marketplace software, or wholesale purchasing solution while extracting your ERP’s full value.

Starter solutions can only take an organization so far and evaluating and implementing ERP systems takes time. So, NetSuite provides the solid foundation growing companies need to hit the ground running and scale up as business demands. The companies that don’t make this necessary investment will surely miss out on capturing market share, and they will stunt growth potential.