QuickBooks Enterprise helps small businesses improve their inventory management workflow in efficiency and profitability. Fishbowl’s inventory management software increases these capabilities without forcing businesses to leave the QuickBooks accounting solution they know and trust.
Fishbowl’s long-standing integration with QuickBooks adds value to growing businesses by centralizing inventory management, improving the order fulfillment process, expanding data collection and monitoring, and more.
What is Advanced Inventory in QuickBooks Enterprise?
Advanced Inventory in QuickBooks Enterprise is an inventory management tool. QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise creates a centralized dashboard that allows businesses to manage their vital inventory processes, including monitoring overhead and labor costs, calculating bills of materials, and calculating the cost of goods sold (COGS).
These advanced inventory features are more powerful than other QuickBooks solutions, especially for manufacturers, wholesalers, and other inventory-intensive businesses. In addition to inventory management, QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise also automates administrative tasks such as payroll, payments, and accounting. Note that QuickBooks Online does not offer the same benefits.
Equipped with these advanced features, QuickBooks Enterprise streamlines production tasks while automating tedious administrative work, leaving more production uptime and less room for human error.
From customized reports and multi-location inventory management to automated inventory forecasts and mobile barcode scanning, QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Inventory equips businesses with end-to-end fulfillment they can trust. Even businesses with plans to scale their operations can more easily reach their goals with a scalable central database.
Benefits of using QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Inventory
By using QuickBooks Desktop to track inventory, order fulfillment, production schedules, and more, businesses can increase their workflow efficiency and problem-solving abilities.
Centralized inventory across multiple locations
QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise allows businesses to configure custom dashboards to display their performance and reporting data. This centralized inventory management system can be accessed in multiple locations, ensuring managers use updated data in all their decisions.
With this system, managers can view inventory levels, track products and assets, and oversee multiple warehouses from a single dashboard. Additionally, QuickBooks maintains an access permission system to secure company data at all of these locations.
More efficient warehousing
Businesses equipped with QuickBooks Enterprise Advanced Inventory systems can optimize their warehouse space while reducing storage costs. The system provides you the reports to allow you to organize and monitor, while better data reporting systems improve efficiency on the back end of warehouse management, barcode scanning, kitting, and storage optimization improve it on the front end.
Centralized vendors data
QuickBooks offers a Vendors Center for businesses to consolidate and store their vendor information. This includes their location, contact information, pricing details, shipping lead times, and more.
By centralizing vendor data, businesses can avoid costly mistakes related to conflicting data entries for one vendor. They can also update vendor profiles to display delivery times so managers always have the latest data when they place their reorder schedules, even from multiple locations.
Reliable cost tracking
Businesses equipped with QuickBooks inventory management software can make better financial decisions using its cost-tracking features. With instant readouts on a business’s expenses, income, invoices, profits & losses, and more, QuickBooks puts real-time cost visibility in the palm of your hand.
Automated sales order fulfillment process
QuickBooks Enterprise utilizes an advanced tracking system to improve order fulfillment. Managers can access inventory levels, order status updates, and more from a priority list created for every order the business makes. Automated tracking and fulfillment unifies the data sources used by your managers while saving admin time for more profitable tasks.
QuickBooks Enterprise inventory management features
To provide these benefits, QuickBooks Enterprise inventory management comes with many features. These include:
Barcodes
Instead of performing manual product counts, QuickBooks users can automatically scan items in and out of their central inventory database using barcodes.
Fishbowl integration allows businesses to generate these barcodes (physically or electronically) to ensure a more efficient stock monitoring process.
Bill of materials
QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise can generate and organize simple bills of materials, though it has trouble with products that require complicated assemblies. Fishbowl allows managers to itemize products into production stages to create custom templates for bills of materials. With features also available for teams to complete multi-level BOM’s.
Landed costs
With QuickBooks Enterprise integrated with Fishbowl, businesses can calculate the landed costs of incoming orders.
Manufacture orders
QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise can set manufacture orders for assembly jobs only. When integrated with Fishbowl, businesses can add disassembly jobs, repair jobs, and more using the upgraded system.
Multi-currency
For manufacturers with international customers or vendors, currency conversion can be time-consuming and costly. QuickBooks Enterprise supports multiple currencies to expedite this process.
Multiple locations
QuickBooks Enterprise provides options for managing inventory from multiple warehouses. Each warehouse can be itemized by zone, such as receiving areas and bin locations, for further management accuracy. The catch is that QuickBooks tends to slow down with complex multi-location setups. Fishbowl integration helps businesses handle multiple inventory locations from one dashboard without losing speed and efficiency.
Part tracking
QuickBooks can only track parts by lot number or serial number. Fishbowl integration improves your managers’ tracking and tracing abilities by supporting multiple tracking metrics separately. It also adds expiration dates, revision numbers, and even custom fields to the list of choices for greater inventory control.
Picking
Custom pick routes enhance a business’s ability to use strategic fulfillment tactics like batch picking to their advantage. Once Fishbowl is integrated with QuickBooks Enterprise, a business would have this option.
Vendors
Fishbowl + QuickBooks gives businesses the ability to choose multiple vendors for each part of their inventory. This allows businesses to meet demand by enlisting other vendors in addition to their preferred ones while keeping their tasks organized by criticality.
Kitting
Kitting, or grouping products together by certain criteria, allows businesses to make their warehouses more efficient. Fishbowl helps QuickBooks users by allowing them to kit products to reduce fulfillment costs by tracking the quantity, measurement, discount rate, tax rate, or other custom metric chosen by the business.
Return merchandise
Return merchandise authorization is required to initialize a product return or replacement. QuickBooks Enterprise and Fishbowl together ensures that the costs of the return process are automatically added to your product cost tracking dashboard.
Transfer orders
Instead of manually generating transfer orders, businesses can use QuickBooks Enterprise to move inventory between locations. Rather than exchanging money, the transfer automatically records in the system.
User rights
QuickBooks takes authorization another step with its user rights function. This allows managers to establish system rights based on the user’s role in the system. Fishbowl takes security yet another step by allowing managers to itemize user rights based on specific system features.
Variable pricing
QuickBooks Enterprise gives managers efficient pricing control, which includes setting up discounts by percentage or fixed amounts.
Filling in the gaps
Most inventory-intensive businesses are concerned about scalability. QuickBooks Enterprise’s Advanced Inventory setup offers versatile solutions for smaller workflows. When integrated with Fishbowl, it can handle more complex setups with room to expand its productivity features to promote scalability.
How to turn on advanced inventory
To access these features, QuickBooks users must activate the Advanced Inventory feature in their QuickBooks account. Follow this step-by-step guide to gain access to the automated tools and centralized data reporting that make QuickBooks such a popular inventory management choice among manufacturers, wholesalers, and more:
- Open your QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise account
- Click “Edit” and scroll to “Preferences”
- Click “Items & Inventory”
- Click the “Company Preferences” tab
- Check “Inventory and Purchase Orders are Active”
- Click “Advanced Inventory Settings” and check the box
This is all you have to do to start taking advantage of QuickBooks Advanced Inventory features. However, not everyone can access these menus. Only Platinum and Diamond account holders can gain access to Advanced Inventory. Check your subscription level to view your compatibility.
Ready to supercharge your inventory management with QuickBooks Enterprise’s Advanced Inventory?
Inventory management software such as QuickBooks Enterprise’s Advanced Inventory provides numerous benefits. By using barcode scanning, location tracking, cost tracking, vendor tracking, and more, businesses can improve their response to demand changes, manage order fulfillment from multiple locations, and expedite their warehouse workflows with real-time data updates.
Though QuickBooks provides many useful features, it has limitations. These include an inability to track serial and lot numbers at the same time, a lack of vendor insights, and limited forecast reporting tools.
To make the most of their QuickBooks Desktop Enterprise subscriptions, businesses turn to Fishbowl’s inventory manufacturing solutions. Our inventory management software covers QuickBooks’ limitations to give businesses a more efficient, more profitable, and more scalable solution for inventory management.