Advanced Inventory in QuickBooks Enterprise – Benefits for Manufacturing Industry

Inventories are the lifeline for the manufacturing industry. A quality inventory management system significantly helps in achieving optimum business growth and allows you to reap greater profits.

However, most of the manufacturing businesses still use traditional methods for managing their inventory, which is inefficient and uneconomical. Also, they lack modern benefits like automated inventory forecasts, smart AI monitoring, etc.

It is the reason why many manufacturing businesses now prefer QuickBooks Enterprise’s Advanced Inventory for their inventory-related needs. It is an easy-to-use software with great functionalities. You can easily track every item in real-time, set automated purchase orders, and more.

Here are the six benefits which Advanced Inventory brings in for the manufacturing industry:

1. Manage Stocks With Barcode

Everyone knows how easy it is to track an item with a barcode. No entry hassles, no fidgeting around for the description, scan the printed barcode, and you’re ready. Leveraging the barcode for tracking your inventory allows you to rapidly take charge of your stock and easily monitor its availability. This allows the heavily inventory-dependent businesses like the manufacturing industry to track their inventory and minimize SKU errors.

QuickBooks Enterprise empowers you to do the same with a reliable barcode scanning option in its Advanced Inventory module. With this feature, you can create, print, and customize barcodes suitably. This allows you to automate your data entry process, avoid stock discrepancies, and monitor your inventory on a real-time basis. For scanning the barcode, you can use a Bluetooth scanner or comfortably let your employees’ android devices become mobile scanners with the QuickBooks Desktop Mobile App.

2. Centralized Inventory

When running a manufacturing business, it is critical to have an accurate inventory count for its smooth functioning. While the non-availability of required items can slow down your production process or even cause a total shut-down, the excess could disrupt your financial resources and result in considerable handling costs. However, there is a solution – centralized inventory management. And this something that you can easily do with the Advanced Inventory in QuickBooks Enterprise.

With Advanced Inventory, you can centralize your inventory pool and have much better control over your item availability. It allows you to conveniently transfer items between multiple warehouses as per the demand and ensure a continuous production process. With the centralized inventory pool, you can identify the closest item availability as per the vendor location and then ship it accordingly to save up on the shipping costs.

3. Systematic Sales Management

For any manufacturing business to flourish, it is critical to have a good sales ratio. There are different factors like current market competition, marketing strategies, vendor availability, etc., that determine the sales flow for an organization. However, managing your current orders plays an instrumental role in determining your standing and influences your future growth. While a smooth, on-time delivery performance can guarantee much-needed credibility and more frequent customers, its opposite could be equally detrimental for your business.

Using Advanced Inventory allows you to bring in systematic sales management and project better business growth. With Advanced Inventory, you can automate your order management process, reduce shipping delays, fulfill dropships, and efficiently manage upcoming delivery dates for guaranteed availability. It has a single dashboard that allows you to view the entire sales order and prioritize accordingly. Also, as inventory is updated in real-time with each sale, you can pre-set the inventory levels and automatically generate purchase orders for ensured and continued item availability.

4. Effective Warehousing

While Advanced Inventory allows you to centralize your inventory resources, it has other beneficial functionalities for effectively managing your warehouses. It offers built-in inventory reports that give you a better insight into the item availability for pinpoint management. What’s more, you can even create your customized inventory reports and add additional fields at your convenience. This way, you can easily manage your inventory levels, forecast item demands, and enjoy better business growth.

Other tools that help in accurate warehousing are Cycle Count, automated inventory forecasting, and tracking via a lot and serial numbers. Advanced Inventory’s Cycle Count allows you to monitor your inventory in real-time without stopping your business operations. You can easily view inventory count and supervise item availability. You can distinguish between items and easily track them by their lot/serials numbers. If you want to track a single item, you can use the serial number, while the lot numbers come in handy when you want to track things in a specific batch.

5. Shipping Management

When it comes to establishing yourself as a successful business venture, it is essential to fulfill customer demands on time. Every timely-delivered order gives you a better reputation among your competitors and paints a good image of you. Thus, it is essential to have quality shipping management in place – something definitely not possible with traditional monitoring systems as they are inefficient and carry a more significant risk margin. So what to do?

Managing your shipping commitments with Advanced Inventory allows you to enjoy premium features and track your order step-by-step. From the time they are picked to the moment they are finally delivered, you can easily track everything with QuickBooks’s Advanced Inventory. You can even print labels from different shipping agencies like FedX, UPS, etc. and with automatic discounts on prescribed carriers. With Alternate Vendor Centre, you can gather all your vendors’ information into one place and effectively manage the orders.

6. Accurate Cost Tracking

While a good sales ratio ensures continued growth for a manufacturing business, it is necessary to monitor the business ROI precisely. For this, they must accurately track all the inventory-related costs and then establish the prices for better fiscal efficiency. With QuickBooks Enterprise’s Advanced Inventory, you can easily track your cost through different methods and implement improved inventory management measures.

You can use the Bill of Materials cost tracking to track individual item prices accurately and set their prices. With the FIFO costing method, you can easily track COGS (cost of goods sold) during a chosen period, a feature incredibly beneficial while filing for taxes. It offers a particular Landed Cost module, which helps you track items shipped in from foreign vendors. You can calculate freight costs, insurances, duties, and other costs to efficiently monitor the landed costs. Also, Inventory Management allows you to switch between different costing methods at your convenience.

Conclusion

Advanced Inventory Management in QuickBooks Enterprise greatly benefits the manufacturing industry with its latest features. You can easily track your orders, calculate the costs accurately, monitor the inventory from one warehouse to another, and have a centralized view of all the inventory items. These features make Inventory Management a golden gem for manufacturers and their business.

Want to know more about Inventory Management for your manufacturing business? Get in touch with our Solutions Consultant at 855-622-8313.