Suggestions for inventory management systems?

[pharry]

Right now I am using Actinic and Quickbooks. Actinic is wonderful for my web store, but is not a true inventory management system. It can not create purchase orders, keep track of what is on order, etc. Quickbooks is great for this, but in three months, I've maxed the file size. I'm getting deperate! I just rebuilt the QB file from scratch in July, and I won't do this again. What a pain.

I have about 5000 active products at any given time. Each month, I add on the average 300 new products, and retire 300 old products. You can not delete products in Quickbooks, so you can see that my file grows rapidly.

Do any of you have similar circumstances? What products do you use w/ Actinic to meet your inventory needs? As much as I hate the thought, I'm afraid I'm going to need a three-way look - Actinic for the web interface, Quickbooks for the accounting, and something else for inventory.

I think I'm going to continue to need Quickbooks for accounting, but not carry it at the product level. I would need to have only summarized invoices. The product level data would need to be in another program. Unless I can find something similar to QB that will handle unlimited products.

I've searched and searched, but I just haven't found anything yet that looks like what I need. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

[Mike Hughes]

I've built my own system in excel that tracks stock, generates supplier orders and monitors supplier backlog, etc. It also analyses the sales levels of each product so I can set the appropriate stock levels and generates various business statistics like the number of orders over time, average order values, and what percentage of customers use the different delivery options we offer.

The next enhancement I'm planning will produce top seller lists and some statistics on our shipping performance.

If you can, then doing this in access makes more sense as excel has some limitations in the number of lines you can have on a single worksheet.

I'd be interested to hear what other people use as developing and maintaining this kind of system takes up quite a bit of my time (though I'd be really lost without it).

Mike

[pharry]

Wow. What a lot of work. But if you don't use something like Quickbooks, I can certainly understand how it is a "must have".

So you manually maintain the quantities in Actinic when you receive inventory? I may receive a shipment with 500 different line items. I don't want to manually update 500 products in Actinic! Right now, I "receive" the purchase order in QB, then using the QB/Actinic link, I update Actinic. I love this feature, and was a key reason why I chose Actinic.

[oldhasbeen]

Hi All

In a very similar position to Pat - QB just doesn't cut the mustard as an inventory management programme (can't even do auto purchase orders even though it has every bit of information it needs to accomplish this).

We stock thousands of product lines and it's becoming a real drag to manage it all through QB (also I don't want my staff seeing my accounts either which means they can't perform simple stock/customer queries independently). The various programmes I've seen which may answer this as a "third way" tend to be EPOS systems with fancy tills, bar coding equipment and a big hefty price tag!

Don't need this - just need something that will convert the QB stock and customer data and manage it for stock in/stock out allowing us to use QB purely for bookkeeping purposes - which is about all it's good for.

Hoping to upgrade Act to business to take advantage of the download orders facility - but if we find an inventory/management product then of course we'd need Actinic to download orders into that, not QB.........

Where does it all end?!

[pharry]

Wow - I am so desperate for a solution, and there are none? Sounds like a huge window of opportunity here. My background is IT. Maybe I need to sell my retail site, and go back into development! (Not serious for even a minute, but I sure wish someone would chime in here with a solution!!)

[chris ashdown]

Does Sage Financial controller fit the bill in most respects?

[tdw]

I am seriously considerig purchasing Actinic Business. I have Sage Line 50 V10 FC so I was thinking of buying the Sage link software too.

I am not expereinced with either pieces of software and I have read some posts in other forums where people have had problems with the link software and sage.

Would you recommend Sage over quickobbks for inventory management?

[cdicken]

The QuickBooks Link is only one-way i.e. it only takes orders from Actinic into Quickbooks. No stock information is automatically transferred from QuickBooks into Actinic.

The Sage Link, however, is 2 way and takes stock data out of Sage into Actinic for displaying on the website. There have been problems with Sage Link historically, mainly because it is a relatively new product with relatively few users. Recent releases have been much more reliable.

[David Eldridge]

QuickBooks US version has a two way link!

Chris is correct in regards to the one-way link in the “UK version” to QuickBooks. However, the “US version” of the Actinic link to QuickBooks has a TWO-WAY link.

Actinic's US Link for QuickBooks Pro / Premier 2002, 2003 and 2004 creates a TWO-WAY link between Actinic Business or Actinic Developer and QuickBooks. It enables the direct export of orders from Actinic Business into QuickBooks accounting software, and the update of customer account, stock level and product information directly from QuickBooks to Actinic Business.
Users can to quickly exchange sales, product and customer data between their Actinic ecommerce site and QuickBooks products

[craigp]

Accounting/Inventory Integrated with Actinic

I too am using Quickbooks and will soon outgrow it. I called Intuit and and suggested I upgrade to their Enterprise edition for $3500. Not!

I have been looking at a program called SQL-Ledger. It is actually a free accounting program if you know what you are doing. You can purchase different levels of support.

I think this could be tied into Actinic and life would be good.

Here is the URL.

http://www.sql-ledger.com

Craig Peterson

[pharry]

Any Quickbooks upgrade as far as I can tell is just a bandaide. Eventually the product limit is going to be reached. I retire about 500 products a month. Right now I've resorted to merging my retired items into a product called "Inactive". Not good accounting, since this screws up the year-end inventory for prior years. And I'm sure other things. And it is a pain to mess with. But, I have no choice. Like you, $3500 isn't going to happen! And I've got to have a solution that works two-way with Actinic.

I'm hoping that one day Actinic will find a better solution for inventory management, and work with that and Quickbooks for the accounting side of things.