QuickBooks integrates with vital manufacturing processes to help modern businesses take control of their supply chain. Whether automating administrative tasks such as scheduling reorders and work orders or refining performance analytics, QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum and Diamond applications offer numerous benefits to inventory-intensive businesses.
Despite these benefits, QuickBooks lacks important capabilities for businesses with complex inventory operations in manufacturing, storage, wholesale, and other industries. That’s why these businesses turn to Fishbowl Manufacturing, the number one manufacturing management solution for QuickBooks users.
Fishbowl provides manufacturing businesses with tools to refine their supply chains, improve their workflows, and scale their operations for bigger and better goals while using QuickBooks QuickBooks to manage accounting. This guide explores the benefits and use cases for QuickBooks as a manufacturing inventory management solution, as well as how Fishbowl can take its features to the next level.
How QuickBooks works for manufacturing
QuickBooks is best known as an accounting software platform (one of the oldest). Its most popular features include manage expenses, income and payroll; however, it also includes the ability to track inventory.
QuickBooks can refine a basic warehouse management workflow in manufacturing and wholesale industries. Though QuickBooks Enterprise, QuickBooks Premier, and QuickBooks Online offer different benefits, every version comes with basic accounting, invoicing, and inventory features that help millions of businesses each year.
Benefits of QuickBooks for a manufacturing business
When properly implemented, QuickBooks provides increased efficiency in inventory management workflows through a few key benefits. These include:
Reduced roadblocks
Manufacturing processes can stand still for numerous reasons, including low communication, high inventory cost, and supply chain bottlenecks. QuickBooks reduces roadblocks by maintaining central supply chain management. This means keeping track of materials, resources, bills, receipts, work orders, schedules, and data reports in one place.
Workers and managers can refer to the system to view the information relevant to their workflow, regardless of location.
Create a master production schedule
With reporting, QuickBooks can identify problem areas in your supply chain workflow. This allows it to help manufacturing businesses outline their storage capacity to meet changing consumer demand.
Improved visibility
Supply chain visibility is critical to inventory management. By tracking inventory amounts, sales, and movement, businesses can monitor their supply chain health and refine their strategies.
Even small businesses with a single storage location can benefit from tracking demand patterns over time, predicting periods of low and high sales, and minimizing holding costs. Real-time visibility is just another way that QuickBooks users can take control of their workflows for the future.
Reduce waste
Increased inventory visibility allows managers to avoid costly stock outs and overstocks by adjusting reorder schedules for changes in demand. This reduces spoilage and unnecessary storage costs.
Production waste can also be reduced with better part allocation, real-time status updates on production, and barcode scanning. Managers of wholesale and manufacturing businesses can use QuickBooks to maintain industry compliance, cut waste disposal costs, and increase customer satisfaction by practicing lean manufacturing, which eliminates guesswork by matching production processes to the current level of demand.
Efficient production scheduling
Optimized job schedules and restocking processes help businesses detect and resolve inefficiencies in their workflows. In manufacturing, this requires efficient production scheduling tools, especially if critical assets must be managed for multiple locations.
Centralize your bill of materials
Bills of material outline essential resources and costs related to individual products. A manufacturing business that lacks standardized record-keeping can make errors tracking multi-component items or those with complex manufacturing steps.
Centralized bills of materials streamline product line management. A unified data record helps multi-location businesses reduce errors and increase efficiency is these once-tedious administrative tasks.
How to know if your manufacturing business needs QuickBooks
QuickBooks accounting software can improve many manufacturing businesses. Yet, its limitations make it incompatible with certain workflows. Fishbowl Manufacturing fills in the gaps in QuickBooks’ design to ensure that businesses of all needs can benefit from its centralized inventory management processes.
Here are a few ways to know whether you business could benefit from QuickBooks accounting software:
You spend too much on data management
Manual data management – from asset condition monitoring and demand forecasting to analytics reporting – can be expensive and time-consuming for even mid-tier manufacturing businesses. QuickBooks applications like QuickBooks Enterprise save businesses time and money by centralizing data management and updating inventory levels.
You have a small number of authorized users and critical files
QuickBooks provides effective optimization for centralized data storage and system access, especially for small and medium-sized businesses. With higher volumes of information and user access, QuickBooks becomes slower and less effective.
Your business produces too much waste
Waste can be a problem both for your bottom line as well as your levels of industry compliance and customer satisfaction. Waste-conscious businesses deploy inventory management tools like QuickBooks to eliminate costly spoilage, reduce storage costs by cutting overstock, and refine manufacturing workflows to produce less material waste.
How to use QuickBooks in manufacturing
QuickBooks manufacturing management ensures high-quality products by streamlining the manufacturing process in numerous ways.
QuickBooks can track raw materials inventory, including in-process parts, to prevent inefficient assembly workflows due to misplaced orders or other supply chain issues. This gives manufacturing businesses complete visibility over their product assembly process, which trickles down to the customers’ visibility.
Businesses should also look into manufacturing-focused QuickBooks add-ons. These custom solutions, like Salesforce help QuickBooks expand its usefulness by linking data systems such as accounting records and automated inventory tracking data. This saves your management team time with manual data entry and tracking tasks, which the default QuickBooks Enterprise and QuickBooks Online versions still require.
Efficient manufacturing inventory management with Fishbowl
QuickBooks provides numerous features to optimize a manufacturing business workflow, including managing inventory, tracking purchase orders, and calculating inventory costs more efficiently. However, QuickBooks also comes with shortcomings, such as a tendency to track negative inventory and difficulties tracking larger databases.
For many manufacturing businesses, QuickBooks is more useful as a starting point than a final solution for inventory management workflows as QuickBooks’ features cannot always adapt to more complex or unique inventory processes. Fishbowl Manufacturing seamlessly integrates with QuickBooks to augment its benefits and add new ones.
Streamlined operations start with real-time visibility, data management, accurate demand forecasting, and optimized production workflows. Fishbowl prioritizes these features and more to fill in the gaps in QuickBooks workflows and future-proof businesses for the next decade of data-driven manufacturing.