QuickBooks has very limited inventory capabilities out of the box. You can get a bit more if you’re using desktop versions – especially QuickBooks Enterprise but even a small distributor or manufacturer will struggle with the limited features available.
What’s interesting is that Intuit acquired SaaS inventory vendor Lettuce in 2014 (for $30 million) with plans to develop a stronger inventory application within QuickBooks Online but to date we have yet to see anything major come from that acquisition. There are still a few Lettuce employees remaining at Intuit but none that were part of the leadership team. The remnants of Lettuce exist only online in a few remaining articles and their Facebook page which includes the very last post on November 4, 2014 regarding their acquisition.
The good news is that there are several great products available on the market to extend QuickBooks in this area. The best by far (in our opinion) is Fishbowl Inventory which works with desktop versions of QuickBooks. What does it do? A ton!
Fishbowl Inventory has literally dozens of features for sales orders, purchasing, part tracking, bills of material, production management, shipping, time and labor tracking, light manufacturing, and even bar coding and point of sale. Further, it integrates with a lot of applications including other accounting systems like Xero, ecommerce platforms like Amazon and Magento, shipping applications like UPS, Salesforce.com for CRM, HighJump or SPS Commerce for EDI, and even SolidWorks for CAD drawings.
Some of the other leading inventory extensions (mostly for QuickBooks Online) available on the apps.com directory include SOS Inventory, Cin7 Inventory, Mobile Field Service, Locate Inventory Management, Stitch Labs, Amazon Sync, Boxstorm, QR Inventory, and more. Just remember that most of the apps available on the online marketplace integrate exclusively with QuickBooks Online and most likely won’t be available for QuickBooks Desktop.
QuickBooks Desktop Inventory Applications will be much harder to find but will likely have a lot more functionality as they typically have many more years of development behind them with larger customer bases.
Some manufacturing extensions such as MISys Manufacturing, Catalyst Manufacturing, Acctivate Inventory Management, and ERPlite are also products to consider.
Photo Courtesy of Samuel Zeller via Unsplash
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