When people think of manufacturing, they may visualize machines and equipment rather than reports and accounting. However, anyone in the manufacturing industry knows the importance of keeping things organized—including finances. Successful manufacturing businesses must efficiently manage raw materials, keep an eye on negative inventory risks, and maintain complete inventory control.
This article discusses the benefits of QuickBooks manufacturing software and how it streamlines operations for manufacturing inventory management. Using dedicated manufacturing inventory software can be the key to avoiding costly mistakes in production, cost tracking, and advanced inventory management.
How QuickBooks Can Help Manufacturers
QuickBooks is accounting software offering different integrations manufacturers can find useful. From inventory management software to production planning, learning how to use this program is crucial, whether you rely on QuickBooks Desktop or you’re interested in exploring QuickBooks enterprise resource planning solutions.
Since inventory and finances are directly connected, you know you want to sell inventory and not allow it to stay in-house too long. Having manufacturing inventory readily tracked keeps operations efficient, especially when you want to manage materials BOM costs accurately and avoid negative inventory.
Using QuickBooks for manufacturing can:
- Create a master production schedule (MSP)
- Improve production scheduling
- Prevent bottlenecks
- Prevent overspending on overhead
With QuickBooks, manufacturing QuickBooks functionality can be further enhanced by integrating apps or exploring enterprise edition upgrades. Many manufacturing businesses also look into third-party programs like activate manufacturing to increase efficiency. The ability to track inventory items and keep costs organized in this kind of manufacturing inventory software can make a major difference in your bottom line.
An Overview of QuickBooks’ Manufacturing and Wholesale Edition
This video offers a quick look at the QuickBooks Enterprise Manufacturing and Wholesale program and how to easily create various reports. Manufacturing wholesale edition capabilities within QuickBooks enterprise edition help manage sales orders, raw materials, and inventory items in one central place. These enterprise manufacturing wholesale features aim to streamline day-to-day manufacturing processes.
Food Manufacturing: Build Assemblies
QuickBooks solves some of the unique challenges of food manufacturing. Learn how by watching the video below. Many manufacturing businesses in the food sector use QuickBooks accounting to manage bills of materials, cost tracking, and advanced inventory features. Build assemblies accurately and monitor raw materials right within manufacturing QuickBooks tools to ensure consistent product quality.
Manufacturing Design
The following video demonstrates the best ways to use QuickBooks to focus on different manufacturing situations and Fourlane client experiences. Manufacturing design often requires careful oversight of materials BOM, cost tracking, and potential negative inventory. QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks manufacturing wholesale functionality helps users keep an eye on each step of the design workflow—along with financial management—providing enterprise resource planning features on a simpler scale.
Stated Costs in Manufacturing
This video addresses misconceptions about QuickBooks. Discover how to create reports that accurately calculate the various costs occurring in the manufacturing process. QuickBooks enterprise manufacturers rely on timely cost tracking to avoid underestimating expenses related to labor, overhead, and raw materials. Incorporating QuickBooks inventory updates can also improve your overall financial management practices and ensure your cost estimates stay accurate.
Inventory Assembly
Learn how to organize various inventory assembly reports in this video. Inventory assembly is a crucial part of manufacturing inventory management. By recording a bill of materials and using the built-in features QuickBooks offers, you can streamline processes, ensuring you have the necessary inventory items on hand. Many users also integrate with activate manufacturing inventory solutions for heightened inventory control, particularly in growing manufacturing businesses.
Eight QuickBooks Manufacturing Features
Here are eight standout things you can do with QuickBooks for manufacturing. By using these manufacturing features effectively, you can strengthen your inventory control, track cost allocations, and reduce negative inventory occurrences across multiple warehouses.
1. Customize Chart of Accounts for Your Business
A chart of accounts is the best way to record all financial transactions within a business. While there are templates offering the basics, like assets, revenue, and expenses, every business is unique—even if they’re in the same industry.
Customizing your chart of accounts will make your financial reporting more accurate and streamlined. It also provides a better idea of how specific areas of your business operate.
QuickBooks provides industry-specific templates and the ability to refine the chart to suit your needs. This ability saves time while recording unique business needs. For manufacturing businesses, this customization can be critical for accurate cost tracking, especially when you need to record raw materials usage or manage advanced inventory across different product lines.
2. Track Discounts and Automate the Cost of Goods
Every manufacturing business has a wide range of customers; sometimes, specific customers get special deals. Whether it’s due to buying high volumes or from customer loyalty, it can take a long time to enter and track different discounts.
QuickBooks automates tracking discounts. Enter the discount once, and you’re done.
You can also monitor the profitability of goods automatically as production, shipping, and other factors increase or decrease. This level of financial management is especially important for manufacturing inventory software where razor-thin profit margins can be affected by the cost of materials BOM or unexpected expenses in manufacturing processes.
3. Integrate to Different eCommerce Platforms
It’s practically impossible to run a successful business without using eCommerce platforms. The problem is that with so many platforms, you’ll waste time manually entering information if they don’t easily connect with your accounting system.
ECommerce platforms like Amazon, Shopify, and others easily integrate with QuickBooks and can save hours of data entry. The two systems talk to each other and update reports based on your sales and inventory.
These integrations enhance overall inventory management features by automatically synchronizing orders, tracking raw materials, and updating financial records. If you want to scale, rely on integrations that help you reduce manual tasks and increase inventory management software precision.
4. Keep Track of Orders
Operating as a manufacturer and retailer means tracking various orders for you and your customers. Tracking large order volumes can lead to mistakes and logistical nightmares as you promise a customer you can fulfill an order—only to discover you don’t have the materials needed to complete it.
Create separate reports for backorders, listing them by date, so when needed supplies are available, you can address orders that have been outstanding the longest. This feature works if you partially fill an order that you must complete. The reporting creates a better customer relationship with accurately communicated timelines.
Of course, this works for regular orders as well. You can run reports to see what orders have been handled and what’s been shipped out and received. You can also track which customers have prepaid for their orders and which still need to pay. With the enterprise edition or manufacturing wholesale edition, you can deepen your view of inventory items, reduce negative inventory, and ensure products arrive on time.
5. Organize Customer Information
Customer information is valuable, and you must protect it. One way to do so is to keep it organized—mixing addresses. This issue is critical for manufacturers because a customer could be a retail brand with multiple stores nationwide.
Keeping addresses organized is straightforward with QuickBooks—create multiple addresses for a single customer without worrying about limits. When preparing to ship products, click the desired customer, and a drop-down menu will appear with the available addresses.
You can also automatically send statements and regular reminders to ensure on-time payment. This level of organization extends to your manufacturing inventory management tasks, allowing you to quickly cross-reference customer orders with your raw materials stock and avoid confusion in your manufacturing processes.
6. Produce Manufacturing Reports
Need a quick way to show how your business is doing? QuickBooks can help with that. Offering various templates relating to the manufacturing industry, you can load them up and share them with shareholders, potential partners, and stakeholders.
Some template examples include:
- Inventory Valuation Report:
- Shows inventory, its value, current sale prices, and more.
- Stock Status Report:
- Provides an inventory volume snapshot.
- Raw Material Shortage Report:
- Also known as an assembly shortage report, this report lists materials volume and reordering requirements to prevent shortages.
These reporting tools function similarly to enterprise resource planning solutions by giving real-time information on cost tracking, manufacturing processes, and advanced inventory levels. Each report helps in avoiding negative inventory issues and streamlines your overall financial management.
7. Record Up-to-Date Bill of Materials
Your bill of materials (BOM), the list of supplies needed to build a product, constantly changes. Monitoring inventory can take much time, with the possibility of costly mistakes.
QuickBooks created a feature that lets users record BOM costs. It also automatically updates costs if factors like labor or material costs change. Having an accurate materials BOM laid out is crucial for manufacturing inventory, ensuring that each product build is tracked efficiently to avoid overuse of raw materials.
8. Track Inventory Changes Automatically
Similar to the materials needed to build products, finished products constantly change. Manually monitoring inventory is an almost impossible task—a mistake waiting to happen.
QuickBooks streamlines inventory tracking through mobile barcode scanning. That way, you’re always up-to-date on how picking, receiving, and cycling counting are changing inventory numbers. This method can work with multiple warehouses, and reports reflect each warehouse’s changes.
Stay updated on your business and reduce data entry mistakes. With advanced inventory functionality, you can keep track of manufacturing inventory in real time and integrate with other inventory software or acctivate manufacturing inventory solutions that may complement your workflows.
Plan Ahead by Consulting with Fourlane
Manufacturing is a precise process. One hiccup could derail operations for days or weeks. Before that happens, create a relationship with a QuickBooks consulting service like Fourlane.
We can help you navigate the program. When you partner with Fourlane, you’ll know who to call for help when issues occur.
See how our services can help you today. Fourlane is experienced in assisting manufacturing businesses using QuickBooks enterprise edition, enterprise manufacturing wholesale, or QuickBooks manufacturing wholesale versions to manage cost tracking, raw materials, and inventory control. Our expertise spans from quick setup of QuickBooks inventory frameworks to helping QuickBooks enterprise manufacturers integrate additional features QuickBooks might not cover out of the box.
