Enhance QuickBooks for Digital B2B Ordering and Inventory Management

As a wholesaler, you’ve had to make a lot of technology decisions to help your business scale. If you’re reading this, you’ve likely chosen a version of the QuickBooks suite of products whether QuickBooks online or QuickBooks desktop. But QuickBooks alone might not be enough for you now. As powerful as it is, it isn’t effective for managing inventory, helping your sales reps or simplifying how your customers can order from you.  Contract pricing levels for different customers isn’t stored in QuickBooks so you are forced to create workarounds or just manually enter pricing. Also, QuickBooks doesn’t have the ability to be EDI compliant to connect into your sales channels which require EDI transmissions.

If your business is growing and evolving, it’s likely that you’re starting to outgrow working with QuickBooks alone — and there are plenty of technology decisions that you’ll have to make in order to take your organization to the next level. This is a daunting task.

Looking for new software solutions that meet all the needs of your growing business can be overwhelming, and time consuming. Learning new technologies and transitioning your staff and your data to new processes can be difficult.

There’s an easier way, you can add integrations into your existing QuickBooks software that meet your needs while helping you keep a system that already works for your company. If you’re already getting what you need from QuickBooks for your accounting and invoicing needs, why disrupt that?

“Integrations are meant to break data silos and can leverage systems to perform more efficiently or intensively.”  https://learn.g2.com/reasons-to-integrate-software

Integrations are the key to opening up new potential for your company beyond what QuickBooks already provides you. With the right partner, you can quickly scale, expanding from the channels that you’re currently selling to, without having to add a bevy of new staff or adding extra training for the people you already have.

These integrations can be wide ranging in terms of function, but the commonality they all share is that they expand how you can use your current QuickBooks setup and save your company time and money. As an example, we offer a wide range of solutions and resources to make QuickBooks more effective for you, such as:

QuickBooks for Customer Ordering

QuickBooks for Digital Wholesale Catalogs

QuickBooks for Multi-Pricing Levels

QuickBooks for Sales Reps

QuickBooks for Inventory

QuickBooks for EDI

CHART:  OrderEase: A Digital Expansion of QuickBooks

Questions to ask yourself when considering a QuickBooks - OrderEase integration

How hard is it to get started with a QuickBooks - OrderEase integration?

With a digital integration provided by OrderEase, you have all the functionality of existing QuickBooks account while being better positioned for digital transformation in the future and enablement of your sales people. 

While it sounds like a mouthful, what it means is that we help you set your business up to be more effective across an even wider range of channels than you were able to work in before — all with minimal effort and little ongoing maintenance on your end.

Just as your bank feed is integrated directly into your QuickBooks, OrderEase allows you to connect your product data, inventory and order feeds directly into your QuickBooks account. 

This allows your company to automate your sales and inventory processes, as well as give your customers digital access to see and order your products directly from you, without having to worry about losing emails or misinterpreting calls.

The best part is, you don’t even need to have a B2B eCommerce website built to get your wholesale customers to order directly from you. If they have the link to your OrderEase account, they can log in with their credentials and see your catalogs with their specific pricing.

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Key Enhancements to QuickBooks

QuickBooks for Customer Ordering

With an easy-to-use portal tied directly to your QuickBooks account, your customers can log in to view your catalogs with their assigned pricing — and order directly from you. As a bonus, your business can be set up in the OrderEase ecosystem as “public”. This means that any retailers using the OrderEase platform who buy from other suppliers like you will be able to view your catalog and request information from your business. If you approve the relationship, you’ll be able to assign pricing and they will be able to get started ordering from you.

Through the OrderEase platform, your customers can work on building their orders at their convenience, then submit them digitally. The orders then get pushed right into your QuickBooks account, reducing the time and effort associated with manual order entry, creating custom price catalogs and sending print catalogs to your customers.

The convenience for both your customers and your organization doesn’t stop there — you also both gain access to a list of past orders through their OrderEase portal. This gives your sales team a way to predict orders, and your customers the ability to create a favorites list for quick and easy re-ordering.

QuickBooks for Digital Wholesale Catalogs

With OrderEase you can have as many catalogs as you need for your business that are easy to access and simple to use. By grouping products into our catalogs, you can control what products each of your customers can see or access, as well as quickly spin up new ones such as seasonal, dropshipping or special promotions. 

With the digital catalogs we offer, you can get new products in front of your customers faster than ever, and run quick sales or blow out inventory with ease. Our system is broad enough that we can suit any of your cataloging needs as you grow and scale. 

QuickBooks for Multi-Pricing Levels

1. Every time a product's price went up, the company would need to go into their QuickBooks account and search for every copy of that product and make the price changes manually.
2. Every time an order was placed by a customer, the order desk person would need to remember which product code should be used for that customer to ensure the proper pricing would be used.
3. Running a promotion for existing products was almost not worth it due to the amount of manual intervention required.
4. As the business grew, this type of manual order entry and manipulation was just not scalable.

QuickBooks for Sales Reps

If you have salespeople on the road or online, you can bet that one of the biggest pains for them is the time it takes to write orders down on paper or fill out an excel sheet to be sent into the office later. Having a digital catalog with accurate customer pricing at their fingertips, and the ability to quickly fill orders is priceless for them.

With the OrderEase digital catalog, it’s easy to show off new products immediately as opposed to waiting for the next print version or other marketing materials to be created. You can give your salespeople the ability to quickly generate revenue on new items from the palm of their hand, while reducing their administrative time significantly.

To make things even easier for your salespeople on the road — OrderEase also has a barcode scanning function through its QuickBooks integration. This means that your rep can walk into any of your customers’ stores, scan the items your clients want to buy and upload them as an order using only a phone and the OrderEase app.

But the biggest bonus of the OrderEase integration for sales rep functionality is that it makes the ordering process simple and intuitive for everyone involved. Customers can build and submit their own orders, which can then be reviewed by your reps. After review, they can either push it directly into QuickBooks or your rep can hold the order and call your customers to discuss upsell or complimentary product options before releasing the order.

Sales reps love the option to use either the online or offline mode which can be enabled in both the mobile app in Android or Apple as well as the desktop option to operate offline.  When calling on customers in some of the more remote areas with limited reception, this feature is priceless!

QuickBooks for Inventory

Unless you’ve chosen to use the “Plus” or “Advanced” version of QuickBooks, you won’t be able to show or manage inventory natively. However, for a lot of companies it doesn’t make sense to upgrade their account just to gain access to the inventory feature when they don’t need some of the other bells and whistles. 

As an alternative to buying a more expensive QuickBooks package — OrderEase can provide you with the features that you need to more effectively run your business even on the “Simple Start” or “Essentials” QuickBooks packages.

Integrating your QuickBooks account with OrderEase will give you the ability to manage your inventory directly through QuickBooks without having to upgrade your original package.

To add on, if you’re selling through multiple channels and have catalogs created for each — you’ll be able to manage inventory allocations to each channel catalog you’ve created. This is helpful if you want to keep specific inventory allocations for certain customers.

QuickBooks for EDI

We’ve found a lot of suppliers really want to sell to the larger retailers but quickly dismiss the idea after they discover just how complicated the rules are to engage with EDI, and that’s not even mentioning the expense involved!

Even companies who have taken the leap into the world of EDI have found that different retailers deal with different EDI providers — meaning that they end up stuck playing by each company’s different rules and paying their incredibly high costs. To top it all off, direct integrations with specific EDI providers for digital ordering is both cost prohibitive and not scalable as your company grows. 

Integrating OrderEase into your QuickBooks account solves these problems. We automate your EDI process, making it as simple as a regular sale for your company, while being less expensive than traditional EDI providers. To put a cherry on top, you won’t need to manage multiple systems, everything can be done directly through our platform, no matter how many channels you’re selling to.

QuickBooks with ShipStation

When OrderEase is integrated into both your QuickBooks and ShipStation account, the magic happens.  Customers who sell on multiple sales channels are hooked with the automations that result from this multi-integration environment OrderEase creates.

In the EDI process, an order is received from the trading partner, this is called an 850. Upon receiving this order in OrderEase, we automatically acknowledge receiving that order (997).  Based on the workflows your company sets up with OrderEase, we have the ability to automatically confirm an order and send it over to ShipStation and into QuickBooks.  

When the shipment is generated and the status in ShipStation is converted to shipped, the tracking information is passed back into OrderEase where an Advance Ship Notice (856) is automatically generated and sent back to your trading partner.  Then, when the 856 is generated, the invoice is pulled from QuickBooks and sent to your trading partner as an 810 (invoice).  All of these actions can happen seamlessly without the need to manually type or trigger anything.  The only step your team has to do in this scenario is physically pack the shipment and change the status in ShipStation to “shipped”.

Along with ShipStation, there are many other integrations OrderEase has developed into logistics providers as well as integrations logistics solutions have developed into OrderEase.  ShipStation was used as an example of what the process can look like.

This covers the key features that make it worth integrating OrderEase with your QuickBooks account.  The table below identifies even more features you will be able to leverage with this integration.

OrderEase: A Digital Expansion of QuickBooks

Questions to ask yourself when considering a QuickBooks - OrderEase integration

We have compiled a quick list of questions to ask yourself as you are working through your options.  If you answer yes to any of the following questions, it means this integration is the right option to scale your business with minimal disruption:

1. Do I have sales reps?
2. Do I want customers to be able to place orders independently?
3. Do I have different prices for different customers?
4. Do I want to show inventory to customers and show out of stock if there is no inventory?
5. Do I want to be able to sell into big retailers who operate their ordering via EDI?
6. Do I want to offer a dropship program?
7. Do I want to sell on multiple channels, but don’t want the hassle of updating / managing multiple programs?

How hard is it to get started with a QuickBooks - OrderEase integration?

Step 1:  Talk to our sales team so we can ensure we are getting you the best option and pricing.

Step 2:  After you decide to go forward with the integration, you will receive a dedicated project manager who will work with you to optimize your account configuration to ensure it works the best possible way with your business.  All businesses operate in their unique ways, which is why we take the time to understand and work with you to make this the best experience for all!

Step 3:  Training

Step 4:  You’re all set!

Ready to start?  Contact an OrderEase sales rep today!  Click on the "Show Me How" button below.