If you are like me, businesses fascinate me. I watch all the shows – Shark Tank, The Profit, Restaurant Impossible, The Pitch – that talk about business struggles, wins and all the in between. It is amazing how many businesses it takes for us to function in our daily lives.
I have been fortunate in the pathway we chose here at Fourlane, to have access to thousands of businesses over the years. So, I thought I can start my own little reality blog called “QuickBooks Insights”. They may not all apply to your business, but they all have a “Happy Tears” takeaway (since these A-Ha moments can cause intense moments of joy), a story (to help you visualize the situation for better knowledge retention) and of course the business solution. I know my focus is on QuickBooks, however you can apply a lot of the logic into other systems as well.
Today’s QuickBooks Insight Tip #1: What’s Your End Game?
When setting up your software, think of the end goal first. If the software does not have the feature you are wanting, think of the fields available and if there can be an alternative way to get to that end result.
You’re Asking “A Lot” Out Of QuickBooks
A Food Manufacturing client was using QuickBooks Premier and said they track lot numbers. Now of course, I know Premier does not track lot numbers, so I can assume they have figured out some other way to make this happen.
They set up each lot number as an inventory part so that they could have pricing and quantity on hand by lot number. They also put the expiration weeks as header items so that they could see which lots were expiring every week and what the quantity on hand was of that product.
This would drive possibly lowering prices for those lot numbers expiring sooner. The problem was they didn’t know how many of any one product they had on hand.
Our Solution
We moved the customer to QuickBooks Enterprise Platinum to be able to enable lot number tracking. We added a custom overlay to the product that maintained the quantity on hand by lot and expiration dates in a separate database that sat on top of QuickBooks.
This allowed our customer to get the expiration reports, QOH by lot number AND we even took it further to push costing by lot number and FIFO picking when doing sales order fulfillment. They needed a new structure.
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