5 Signs You Need to Upgrade Your Quickbooks & Excel Setup

QuickBooks is perhaps one of your first friends in starting your business ventures, but you’ll notice it can’t keep up with your demands of efficient operation or satisfy your intricate management needs of your ever-growing business. And with your lingering #NewYearNewMe attitude, you need a gentle push in meeting your resolution of a faster, more sufficient, and more accurate integrated system to manage your business.

If you raise your hand and say, “That’s me” to any of the following experiences, it’s time to move on from QuickBooks for anything beyond your general ledger.

1. You Spend a Lot of Time Manually Managing Inventory

Let’s start with your product. It’s a no-brainer that you will have a sea of products that vary in style, colors, and sizes. QuickBooks might work for the style, but color and sizes are an issue as QuickBooks does not handle the inventory matrix for fashion. You will spend more time than needed creating a new product for every color and size, which is extremely repetitive. This also means orders and invoices are too complicated and complex looking, inventory is difficult at best and there is no way to get a real ‘open to sell by date’ report by product and/or color/size.

2. You Get Headaches from Manually Managing your Domestic and Import Production

If you barely have enough time to manually manage inventory, just thinking about manually managing production already gives you a headache. You have the chaos of production, late deliveries, too much or not enough in production, and delayed shipping. With a fashion specific business software, you get a full production tracking system that is integrated with your orders. It gives you the ability to specify a delivery window for your production, so you know what is coming when, if you have too much, or too little. You see it all in one system. No more jumping back and forth between Excel sheets.

3. You Are Entering Your Orders into Multiple Places Too Many Times

Your business is omnichannel, so you find yourself entering order information to QuickBooks, and using multiple excel sheets for tracking. Both Quickbooks and Excel lack an integrated system to easily communicate with your business and your different partnerships. Too many channels mean too much time wasted on entering your orders multiple times instead of focusing on other areas of your business. An integrated system is the only software you need to have a more sophisticated way of communication to make your orders talk to your inventory, production, customer service, factor, EDI, or online store for you.

4. You Have to Guess Who to Ship, With No Ability for Intelligent Allocation and Fulfillment

Besides the pain of double entering order information, you find a huge lack of visibility in your inventory or units you have currently and which customer it should go to. With QuickBooks and Excel, this can get overly complicated. An Intelligent Order allocation and fulfillment system will do this easily based on the rules you set. Plus, you’ll earn some brownie points since your warehouse manager no longer need to chase things down.

5. You Have Too Many Excel Sheets to Name

A fashion business operates under a whole new set of metrics -- you need easy access to these metrics for a variety of purposes: reporting to the “board”, identifying opportunities, and to be within reach of your business budgeting and finances, to name a few. Simply put you need a single source of truth about your company.

You need a system that provides the necessary reporting along with options for Business Intelligence that lets you easily drive your business forward at a glance. Why spend time with multiple Excel sheets trying to figure out inventory levels, where your production is at or when it’s coming in when you can use a fashion software to get this information quickly and painlessly in one place. You need results that will drive your business on a successful track! And with the right software, it can produce detailed metrics, giving you straightforward answers like the most and least profitable colored, pocketed, two-buttoned cardigan you distributed last season.

If you can relate to any of these five experiences, it’s time to move up from QuickBooks and Excel. AIMS360 offers a smooth transition from your QuickBooks file and Excel sheets into its integrated system that will become the extra hands in fulfilling your management needs you didn’t know you had.