An advanced purchase order management system provides a flexible way of procuring goods and services from vendors, updating inventory with received goods, and pay the supplier as goods are delivered. Sometimes, this process may get more complicated — you may want to have a chain of the approval process of purchase orders. And sometimes, you want to drop ship items. There are many other options that you want to perform such as linking a purchase order to a sales order, creating a single bill or multiple bills from a single purchase order, or linking a purchase order with a work order, or simply purchasing more items than a customer needs for future inventory. Furthermore, you may want to maintain vendors’ catalogs for quick purchase. So having a flexible and advanced purchase order system is key to run the business with ease and speed.
Quickbooks
We all know Quickbooks is basically accounting software. And it is good accounting software for small businesses. They have been adding inventory, purchase order management systems, sales orders, field service, and other applications to help their customers run their businesses. But, simply put, except accounting software, the rest are cooky cutter applications. Most of them are quite basic and do not have the features that small businesses are really looking for. Today, small business runs a complex business workflow as enterprise companies do. Quickbooks business applications do not provide enough flexibility and so small businesses are looking for other solutions to fill these gaps.
As a small business, here are the Key Features that you must look for in a purchase order management system:
- A cloud-based purchase order system software integrated with multi-location inventory
- Spend management — spend visibility of all purchases for quicker invoice processing for better expense management of your business
- Generate a single bill from a PO even while receiving goods multiple times for the same PO
- Purchase more than the customer’s requirements but add in inventory the additional purchased items
- Return or receive full or partial delivery — auto-generation of bill or invoice
- Attach vendor’s invoice in the Purchase Order
- Linked POs on a sales order
- Vendor dropship order management software
- Purchase order inventory management system software integrates with inventory and sales orders
- Inventory stock replenishment alerts to PO in one-click
- Multi-level purchase order approvals and Email notification
- Inventory tracking in purchase order to invoice software
- User activities on the purchase orders are logged
- Purchase order management software with multi-currency support
- Field service work orders are linked with the purchase orders
- Vendor inventory catalog management for purchase order management software
Datamoto Purchase Order Management Software
Datamoto provides a purchase order system, sales order, inventory, work order, and integrates with Quickbooks Online and Desktop. Many small businesses are starting to migrate their purchase order and inventory operations to Datamoto from Quickbooks so that they can get all the advanced features in the Datamoto and at the same time their accounting is still in the Quickbooks. To explain the journey of migrations, I have a picked one small business that recently started using Datamoto along with Quickbooks.
Company: Equipment Sales and Service Provider
A US-based small business (total regular employees: 11) that manufactures industrial centrifuges and solvent extraction equipment for the pharmaceutical, fine chemical, food, textile industries. It provides a turnkey project from sourcing all the equipment, parts, installation, training, and servicing. It has many S&P 500 customers to small business manufacturers across the USA.
Pain Points: It has been using Quickbooks for accounting, sales, purchase, and inventory. All five engineers who are responsible for sales and services have access to Quickbooks and which is a big pain for the accountant. Moreover, they could not easily track their inventory, drop-ship has been a challenge, and generating multiple bills, buying more than customer’s requirement and keeping it track in inventory automatically from a PO is not as smooth as they would like to see. To smooth the operation, they maintained multiple Excel sheets to keep track of each job they performed for their clients.
Solution: They licensed the enterprise version of Datamoto for their Inventory, Purchase Order, Sales Order, and Field Service — Work Order. Once the initial discovery of the customer’s requirements is completed, Datamoto was configured, Quickbooks desktop integration is configured, and uploaded all the extracted data from Quickbooks into Datamoto within a week. In the second week, we provided training to seven members who planned to use Datamoto regularly.
Outcome: Now their accounting and the rest of the business operations are separated. Field engineers can easily create purchase orders and link them to a sales order for better tracking. They can adjust purchase quantity in PO and have complete visibility of inventory. Moreover, drop-ship purchase and tracking inventory become easy operations. Using Datamoto’s field service — work order app, they no longer have to maintain Excel Sheet.
There are many other small businesses of employees size from 3 to 200 are using Datamoto for their Purchase Order Management, Sales Order Management, Inventory Management, Field Service — Work Order along with Quickbooks. To learn more about it, please visit:
