Help with Quoting, Invoicing, job tracking, and inventory
Hi there. I work at a small mom and pa laser engraving business. We recently merged all three engraving businesses in our area into one and have had a hard time handling the giant spike in clients, jobs, and inventory.
Right now we are using Simply Accounting for our quoting, invoicing, and book balancing. Simply Accounting is Simply horrible for quoting/invoicing/inventory. I've been trying to find a solution that is more advance and modern. I took a quick peak at Freshbooks but I am not sure what would be the best solution for a small, but growing, business to help us keep track of everything. Right now one of the issues we are running into is the fact that was have 50,000 plus items that we can order and supply to our clients and we've been having a hard time keeping our pricing consistent across the board. I've been trying to put things into Simple Accounting with the price list I'm trying to put into place but my co-workers that take care of quoting aren't overly tech savvy and Simply Accounting is a slow and clunky program so our pricing remains all over the place.
The other issue I am having is with job tracking. I've set up a Tuleap server (agile project manager) and have a kanban board set up that has the days of the week as columns and each job you can assign to specific employees to work on. Each new artifact you make has the clients name and contacts, the job name, the engraving information, items needed for job, due date, and quoted price. The older gentlemen wish to have everything on paper so there is way to print the jobs so that everything is in paper form (though it's kind of a janky process to print the job info). I'm wondering if anyone knows a better and simpler way to enter jobs, print job details, and keep track of jobs in a visually easy way that is so simple that even people who aren't good with technology can do it. Maybe even something that can be on an iPad so that customers can fill out their own order request forms while at the counter.
I've been hunting for ways to make things so simple and easy for my boss that he actually uses it. Also so simple that even our customers can use it. Most of our customers are between the ages of 45 to 95 so their technical abilities and understanding really vary. I'd love to be able to have a giant part price guide with pictures are prices for EVERYTHING but when you're dealing with four different suppliers and tens of thousands of products that are constantly changing, it may be difficult. Though I guess that's another things, does anyone know of a program I can use to enter in mass amounts of data (such as a picture, product name, product number, supplier, and price) and then populate that data into a simple and clean looking price book or something.
Thanks in advance for any advice. I've been beating my head against the wall here for the past few months and could really use some help.
Posted Sep 9, 2018, 3:50 AM UTC
It sounds like some of your business administrative functions are due for an overhaul and I have a few thoughts. First of all, Freshbooks is not a real accounting solution (even they say so—it’s only for service-based Schedule C filers to collect information to be sent to an accountant), and is geared toward freelancers (weird that it’s so expensive, for having such limited capabilities). If your business has inventory or employees, then Freshbooks won’t work.
You’ll need something more like QuickBooks/Online, Xero, or possibly even a custom solution, depending on your budget for building your dream system. It sounds like you also need a system to manage the information flow and sales processes, to complement the accounting system. Evernote, or a solution like it, may also be a good platform to assist with your planning and quoting needs. And, you’ll probably also want something such as TSheets to track work hours by customer/project. Or, if you really want to invest, you could have a developer build your custom system on top of an open-source project such as Ledger or Beancount (actually Beancount may worth considering out of the box). This has pros and cons. You can build whatever you want, and have any user interface you like. But it’s likely to be expensive. It could be worth it in your case 🤷🏼♂️
From the sounds, of it, QuickBooks Online + Evernote should be a more robust and user-friendly (and affordable) solution for your needs, and they’re both cross-platform with mobile support and you can print whatever you want. You’ll still need to do a lot of customization and setup in both systems before everything will be running smoothly (importing those 50,000 items from a csv file, for one major thing), however something along those lines is probably what you need. Maybe it’s Sage and FileMaker Pro instead—take a hard look at your needs and what these services and software packages provide—but I’d look for a solid software development company with a track record such as Intuit or Sage for accounting, and Evernote, Microsoft, or FileMaker Pro for your information repository. FileMaker Pro could actually handle the majority of your stated needs quite well, but you’d need a developer to build something customized for you, or you’d need to learn some technical things and build it yourself (not recommended, unless you’ve built relational databases or are only leaning on FMPro for a simple process). Again, if you’ve got some cash and/or time to build something decent, this may be a good bet. I’d consider this route seriously because FileMaker Pro is a real database solution with a solid company behind it and solid developer community around it, and it’s user-friendly to build and use FileMaker Pro solutions. This would be the ideal route to build something slick-looking and user friendly (even branded with your logo) that a customer can use on your iPad at the counter.
Download the trial version of FileMaker Pro. It is THE solution for making the clean price book you want, IMO, and you’ll be able to make that book fairly easily by yourself I think. I have done this before, to generate thousands upon thousands of data-driven postcards for marketing purposes. You could also create the book in Evernote but printing would be less pretty and it would probably be a bigger hassle to manage mass changes to many items if you use that database for more than creating the book. Doing that one thing in FileMaker will give you a feel for it and you may see areas where it can help you. Honestly, NO JOKE... building that gigantic book should take less than 2 hours in FileMaker Pro, assuming you already have the data in a CSV/similar file, and photos of each item. (Don’t hesitate to PM if you need help with this.)
For larger businesses, there are also all-encompassing Enterprise Resource Planning packages such as SAP and Oracle, but those are very expensive and not user-friendly for non-technical people. They’re often finicky for even technical people to use.
One last quick tip is to think about the general flow of information in your business and how work processes are working or not.
There’s a lot of “productivity” porn out there and I don’t recommend getting too deep into the cult, but the book Getting Things Done by David Allen may give you some ideas for changing your workflow for the better. It’s a good book but can be overwhelming with how many facets there are to his productivity system. If it were me, I’d quickly read the book (or even just someone else’s summary/overview of it), ignore the things that don’t make sense or cause anxiety, and adopt the things that make sense to you in your own work.
I think you can figure out, as I have, a decent way of tracking projects and progress with Evernote (or FileMaker Pro). In Evernote, you can move notes to different notebooks or apply different tags to indicate project status. You may also want to consider Asana for those team-based projects, if you’d rather keep project tasks separate from their reference materials. Asana has great project tracking functions and clean UI that are worth investigating. For my purposes, I found it to be pricey.
Edit: I keep thinking about how great FileMaker Pro is, remembered it can instantaneously generate a print-ready book of prices for 50,000 items with photos with minimal hassle, even if OP doesn’t use it for anything else.
I’ll put in a good word for QuickBooks online. It’s been great for my business. Very few problems, though the cost is slightly high IMO especially if you also use the payroll function.
We use a combination of Wrike and regular Google sheets to track projects. Works if you use it daily.
I was trying to use google sheets for job quoting and product ordering but that fell apart because it was too many steps for my coworkers so I had to scrap that and go back to the drawing board. I need a solution that is so unbelievably easy (at least on the surface) so that my coworkers can actually use it, even if I have to do a ton of extra work under the surface to get everything proper. I'll check out QuickBooks, see what they offer. I wish I could just do more stuff and have it easier in Sage Simply Accounting but the program is slow and poorly setup.
QuickBooks has an estimate feature that all employees can use without giving them access to the deeper more sensitive financials. When the clients accept the estimate, you just click “create invoice” and it can email them automatically. It’s slick.
That would be very handy. You can also print out physical invoices right? We still have a lot of elderly customers who do not have email address so we would need to do those with paper. Also for adding items into inventory for QuickBooks, is there a way to mass import a .CVS file or anything like that?
For the long term I would look into a custom solution for your specific workflow. Any of the shelf ware has shortcomings and is not expandable in the areas you need. Accounting software do a great job in accounting, perhaps overkill for a smaller kind of business, but they lack in warehousing, ordering etc. With a custom solution you get every part that you need, the way you want it to work. I am programmer specialized in small to medium business applications and worked in retail, manufacturing, distribution and export environments.. Sap, Oracle eytc is out of reach financially seen for most smaller businesses. Solutions in the cloud are great until the day comes that you have connection problems and your 40 employees can't work. So, careful with all that modern nonsense when it comes to business.
I’m not necessarily disagreeing, but we don’t fully know the OP’s needs yet, so I’m not so quick to say he certainly needs something fully customized although it sounds like there are some parts of his process that need something custom-fit. The great thing about solutions like QuickBooks Online and Xero are the integrations with so many third-party services that make it possible for the end-user business owner to build many of his own automations without a programmer. Same with Evernote. There’s usually a monthly subscription price instead of a fee to a programmer. A small business would probably rather outsource IT overhead and security concerns to Intuit and other established service providers for fees (which add up), while a larger business can hopefully afford a full IT staff and prefer to own and maintain their own systems. Pros and cons everywhere.
I'm gonna do a lot of research into current off the shelf programs and solutions available and see which of them have potential and could work. There's a chance we may have to go to a custom design solution, who knows. The system I have currently isn't horrible and would work if I was working with 4 of me, but I'm not and my coworkers aren't overly tech savvy so now I'm trying to find something so simple and so effective that I can get even my coworkers to figure it out. Right now we're bleeding money when we have no reason to be. We lose jobs because paperwork gets misplaced, we have to redo and remake jobs because they weren't done properly because the proper information wasn't received from the client to begin with, so I'm pretty much smashing my head against the wall trying to right the ship with zero assistance from anyone around me.
I have nearly 13,000 notes in Evernote—in fact, I’m probably ahead of, or not far behind Evernote’s CEO in terms of note volume. It’s pretty much the only way I store critical information now, with a few narrow exceptions where I want better security. I don’t even use a filing cabinet anymore—I scan, shred, and burn all paper and it feels great 😈 You can find nearly any document instantly just by searching for a phrase or tag. You can even search for handwriting in photos and PDFs because they OCR everything on the back-end. I used it a few months ago while I was on the phone with the bank to pull up a bank statement (they’re all luxuriously automatically pulled into Evernote via FileThis) and get some info. It took me 20 seconds and I found the info faster than the service rep who was looking for the same info using the bank’s own systems. That’s just one use case. I use it for processing and archiving many important documents every single day, and being able to recall them immediately. I can’t imagine searching for random slips of paper anymore. It drives me crazy whenever I know there’s a physical piece of paper laying around which needs to be archived for business records and knowledge sharing, or have some action taken related to it, and it hasn’t been archived or put into a task workflow of any kind. If it’s in the system, then I don’t stress because I know the document and any associated tasks will be handled appropriately. OneNote has similar functionality and is more structured, at least differently structured, but Evernote is a better fit for needs like mine and maybe yours. A sales workflow would help as well, to make sure those questions are asked up front. If there was a document template in Evernote or somewhere else, even a Word doc that could be printed if desired, with questions that every salesperson asked and checkboxes to be marked before a sale is considered to be completed, then perhaps they wouldn’t forget the simple stuff. I’m a fan of documenting processes and following a routine instead of relying people’s memories (especially mine!). If you read about GTD, there’s the concept of the “tickler file” where a document may not be a business record or related to an important task (like a sales promotion discount code you’re thinking of using, for example), but becomes relevant on a certain day of the month. For example, you received a postcard for a huge discount on an industry trade expo that could be a good opportunity to expand your reach but tickets aren’t available until the 25th, and you want to take some time to discuss it with your colleagues. You know this is a dumb slip of paper and you’ve got real work to do and may not remember when tickets go on sale. In Evernote, you can set a reminder on the note for the date you plan to speak to your colleagues, or the date the tickets are on sale, to “tickle your brain” and remind about that topic. You’ll get a notification in Evernote and be able to quickly see what it was that you wanted to be reminded about. So, I use Evernote’s reminders as a “tickler” for most items, and for hard project deadlines (you can see reminders separated by notebook). So for my project notes, I know the reminders are hard deadlines. For everything else, I know they’re lower-priority reminders and “heads up” notices.