Business Success Powered by Inventory Management

0:17 Brittany Brown

Thanks. So welcome, excited to do this. I've been looking forward to this for quite some time. Here at LedgerGurus, we've been involved with inventory for a very long time, but we have always kind of gone about it in a more manual process. And we recently decided to really deepen our relationships with inventory solutions, Finale being one of our very, very top picks for a number of reasons, and it has really been a game changer for us and for our clients. And today we really want to talk about why IMS, and what you should look for in an IMS, and the solutions that an IMS can handle for you.

0:56

So the first thing I want to talk about is, if you are a product based business, you already know this, I know I'm preaching to the choir on this, but COGS is the most important financial metric to track, besides revenue. And why is that true? Because most of us started businesses because we wanted to earn money, and cost of goods sold is typically the biggest expense that your business faces. In this day and age, marketing might be starting to get really up there, with all the changes that have turned all product businesses into turmoil when it comes to like Facebook ads and stuff like that, but in general, cost of goods sold is your single biggest expense.

1:32

And so when you're looking at your financial performance, you have sales, and that's immediately followed by cost of goods sold, and that gives you gross profit. The way we typically like to look at our financial information for our clients' benefit is in ways that try to help break down really what's driving or limiting their success. So we always think of this in terms of a couple of buckets. We think about the overall sales numbers. We think about the cost of goods sold numbers. Then we think about what I call the cost of sales. Actually, I didn't come up with that phrase, it existed before me, but I really like to think about this cost of sales. And cost of sales includes all of the costs you have to incur in order to sell a product, especially if you're typically selling online.

2:12

And those things include things like the ad spend, like if you're using ads to drive customers to your website, ad spend is a critical, necessary expense. As is fulfillment. If you are selling to people and they're not walking into your storefront and checking out through your point of sale system, instead they're buying on a website somewhere and you're having to sell them that product and ship it to them, you literally cannot sell that product without incurring fulfillment costs. Channel fees as well, and payment processor fees as well, are all costs that are just such a standard part of the cost of doing business.

2:44

And everything else underneath that would be what I would just call overhead. Like the wages you're paying to various people, the rent you're paying on your building, the car that you bought yourself, it's a business expense, the insurance. All of those other things are, many of them, necessary and important. I'm not saying to do without them. But they are not necessarily the cost that you absolutely have to have in order to be able to sell your product. All of that takes us to our net income, of all of these things I just talked about.

3:14

All of the rest of this is fairly easy to track. If I want to track ad spend, I just see what I've spent. If I want to track fulfillment, I just look at my USPS bills or whatever. Cost of goods sold is not that way. Cost of goods sold is not straightforward. It is not an easy metric to track, and it becomes more complex the more you grow, the more inventory you have, the more locations you have it in, and the more numbers of SKUs you have. All of that makes it more and more and more complex. So if cost of goods sold is such an important metric to track, and it is really hard to track, but it's one of the biggest indicators of success or failure, then what's a soul to do?

3:59 Quantity, value, and the spreadsheet breaking point

Brittany Brown

So when you are tracking cost of goods sold, and I want you guys to think about the offset of this being inventory. I'm not going to go in deep right now about the way that the balance sheet and the income statement work together, because I don't want to lose most of you. That's not what you were here for, was a lecture on accounting. But just know that these two pieces are in a relationship together. The inventory that's sitting on my balance sheet moves off of my balance sheet through my profit and loss, through cost of goods sold, and vice versa.

4:28

And so when I'm deciding how this is going to move, what my COGS expense is going to be, how much is sitting in ending inventory, there's really two things that I really have to nail down, and that is the quantity and the value. So what do I mean by that? Quantity includes like, how many SKUs do I have, how much has been purchased, how much has been received, how much has been sold, what's been returned, what's remaining. Half the battle is to just say, we bought 10 of these, we sold two of them, we had one of them returned, and we have one remaining. All of that is half the battle. But the other half of the battle is value. What have you assigned to those different SKUs, to those different quantities, and where are those things sitting between your balance sheet and your profit and loss? If you can't clearly identify both the quantity, what's coming, what's going, where it's sitting, what you have left, what's been sold, and the value that's being assigned to each of those SKUs, getting to the bottom of what should be on your balance sheet and what should be on your profit and loss is virtually impossible.

5:29

So this is just a quick mapping to show you guys, all of these activities you're doing, what's been purchased, what's been received, what's been sold, what's been returned, what's remaining, how it all maps into your balance sheet and profit and loss. And you can see there's a lot of lines, and there's a lot of crossover, and there's a lot of complexity around this. This presentation is not designed to scare you guys off. Many of you are already aware of the complexity of this problem. Many of you are already tearing your hair out about this.

6:02

What LedgerGurus does is we support ecommerce clients and their accounting functions. We handle all of their internal accounting functions. Basically 100% of all clients that come to us, when we are having that initial discovery call with them, where we're asking them where their pain points are and what their problems are and what's happening, like 100% of them are saying, inventory is such a problem for me. I don't know what I have, I don't know what its value is, I don't know where it is. Everything just feels really messy right now.

6:32

So how do we solve this problem? Well, I can tell you that the IMS makes this problem significantly easier. And by the way, IMS stands for inventory management system, of which Finale is one of them. So when you hear me say IMS as we go on, that's what I'm talking about. An IMS tool makes this problem significantly easier. Do you have to have an IMS tool to function effectively? No, you don't. And LedgerGurus has been helping our clients for years manually track COGS and inventory with spreadsheets. However, there is so many limitations to that approach that eventually the hassle of trying to do it that way overcomes you, and you lose your will to live. This I know for sure. And so therefore, when you reach that tipping point, where it becomes so problematic that you're spending so much time trying to keep the data right and to keep the data clean, you are really at a point where the IMS becomes inevitably imperative, that you pick this tool up.

7:33

And IMS tools are actually, I mean, many of them are shockingly affordable, many of them are shockingly expensive, but many of them are shockingly affordable. One of the reasons we love Finale so much is because they have a really great entry price point. Their entry price point is $75 a month. And when we saw that, we were like, at this entry price point, now I don't want to mislead you guys, that's for a very simple situation where you have basically one connection, only a handful of users. But at that price point, we knew that we could get many of our clients into that tool effectively, and start helping them learn the process of effective operational management. Because that is half the battle.

8:21

We're going to be talking in just a second about how an IMS system is both an operational tool as well as a financial tool. I've been really pushing on the financial side of things up to this point in time, but the reality is that inventory is both an operational problem and a financial problem. And many people feel the impact of the operational problem long before they are aware of the fact that their financial data is in disarray. Because when they don't know what's on order, and they don't know what they have on hand, and they don't know what's in each warehouse, and they don't know where it's at in that warehouse, and they don't know what their costs are associated with that, they begin to feel the pain of that. And they don't know what to do with returns, and inventory is just leaving, and they don't have eyeballs on their most important asset. They feel the pain of this operationally long before they feel the pain of it financially.

9:11

So inventory is your most important asset as a product based business. If you did not have any inventory, you would have no business. If you have no inventory to sell, you have no business. Therefore, when you invest your hard-earned money into inventory, and then it comes and it sits in your warehouse or it sits in a 3PL, and you don't have eyeballs on it, and you don't know what's happening, and you don't know what's on order, and FBA says you have this much on hand, but you're pretty sure you should have more than that on hand, but you don't really have good records that give you a clear indication of how much should be on hand, it is stressful creating.

9:48

Now, I also own a product based business, and I can tell you, one of the most frustrating things in the world for me is when suddenly they lose a whole pallet of inventory, and then suddenly, a year later, they find that pallet of inventory, and now all that product is expired. Before we had an IMS system in place, we didn't have good visibility into that situation. And so when they just did a count and our inventory numbers were super off, we just thought our records were wrong, because we were doing all this in spreadsheets. So what an IMS system has done is it's given us significantly more ability to hold the other parties accountable. Because we know what's been received, we know what's been ordered, we know what should be sitting in their warehouse, we know what's been sold, we know what's been returned, and therefore we know what the ending balance should be. And when that count happens and it's off, now I have records of my own that are very empowering.

10:44

So an IMS is an operational and a financial tool. It automates many of the key processes. And the beautiful thing is, when you successfully use an inventory tool operationally correctly, the financial metrics that you need are a natural byproduct of the tool. And that is a really, really great thing.

11:06

So you can do a lot of these processes manually. You can do a lot of these processes through spreadsheets. I know, because I've done them. Like I said, it took a toll, years of my life I could never recover. So therefore, we have been much happier with an operational tool in place, because it allows us to streamline and make easier and cut down the time spent on many of these key processes that had to happen, that were happening, but just either were not happening effectively, efficiently, correctly and consistently, or were taking such a massive amount of time, because there was no automation around it at all.

11:42

You know, years of pulling down sales reports from channels, and identifying what's been sold by SKU, and then calculating that out by some cost by product that we came up with. Now, I'm telling you right now, this method that I'm describing is much, much, much better than just expensing all your inventory at the time that you bought it, because you just cannot bring yourself to go there. However, this long form method of pulling down sales data, deciding through spreadsheets what my cost per product is going to be, multiplying all that out, recording cost of goods sold, having huge true ups when we had to do inventory counts, while that is better than the alternative of expensing right away, it is so much easier to have IMS tools that are integrated with my channel, that actually tell me what sold by SKU, that are then pulling COGS data, because I put in all my purchase orders and I put in all my bills and I received all my inventory into a warehouse, and now it naturally calculates for me, every single time a sale comes down from my channel, it naturally calculates that COGS for me. That world has been a much easier place to live in than the spreadsheet world was before.

12:49

So this is a slide that Mike is going to touch on at the end of his presentation as well, but I just want to talk about how these two worlds are married together. How the world of operations and the world of financials end up looking inside of an IMS system. Accounts payable then becomes my supplier bills, which then builds my SKU quantities. My inventory value is determined by a quantity on hand, and the value associated by those quantities on hand. The revenue coming into my channels becomes the sales data inside my inventory tool. And my COGS is calculated by the cost of all the inventory shipped, that is directly accounted for inside my IMS tool.

13:33

So I hope, as I turn the floor over to Finale, I hope I have made a pretty compelling case for how the turmoil of a product-based business trying to run entirely out of spreadsheets can be solved by an IMS. How the entry point into an IMS could be affordable. The journey of learning to use an IMS correctly will bring operational, financial maturity to your entire organization across the board in a much more effective way. And how your ability to then scale without ripping your hair out will be significantly impacted in a positive way. So we're going to take just a second, and they're going to share their screen instead, and I'm going to stop my screen share. In the meantime, if you have any questions, feel free to ask them in the question and answer manager or in the comments.

14:27 Why Finale: automation, visibility, scale

Mike Kroger

All right, well, thank you, Brittany, for such an outstanding, what I would say, overview and an introduction to why IMS. It kind of plays right into what Finale Inventory exists for. We are an inventory management system and software, and I think you said it perfectly about operational management. I mean, it's really more, I think, a describing term about Finale Inventory. Some people see the word inventory and think it's just about how many I have and where it is. Inventory management goes way beyond that, and Finale Inventory goes way beyond that.

15:08

So what do we mean by why Finale? A lot of this we're going to talk about in terms of what can Finale do. I want everybody to understand, we got a lot of bullet points here, we could rattle them off, but I want you to think of it as automating your operational management, and automating the collection of all of your cost and your revenue and the financial information that you need to be accounting for. Automating that, in terms of, like, instead of, like you say, having big cheat sheets or Excel sheets, and then trying to communicate that with your bookkeeper or your CPA in an intelligent way that they can make sense of it, Finale Inventory is going to give you the ability to automate that. Because instead of doing it once and then having to rehash that through spreadsheets and reports, Finale will just take care of that for you.

16:08

We want you to think of this as, move your operations out of your accounting system, move your operations out of your spreadsheets. Your operations shouldn't begin there. Your operations should begin in a tool like Finale Inventory. So when you make that operational switch and focus more on a software tool like Finale Inventory, you're going to gain the automation, you're going to gain accuracy, that's a big one, you're going to gain visibility that you have never been able to see in one spot. So a lot of times you're going to have a lot of really good data in your Excel sheets or your reports, but a lot of times it's very difficult to kind of correlate them together. It's better to have them in one spot, and Finale Inventory is going to do that by giving you a tool that puts it in one spot.

17:01

Cost of goods sold is what we do. We are going to show you in the live demo here soon, and give you a demonstration on how we achieve that, so that you have an accurate understanding of the value of everything you have, where it is, and what it costs you.

17:19

The other thing that we want to talk about with using an IMS is scalability. You can do some amazing things in Excel sheets, and literally every business starts there. You can do some decent things with an accounting package. But you're going to very soon, quickly realize, as you improve your business and as your business starts to take off, you will then run into what would be efficiencies and scalability issues that are going to prevent you from being able to grow, and grow at a pace that makes you successful. So Finale Inventory is going to bring scalability to it, because we can scale larger, way larger, than Excel sheets can, and we can scale way larger than an accounting system typically will allow you to do it. Accounting systems are mostly designed to do accounting, and they summarize data. They are not very good at heavy transactions. So as you see this picture on the screen here, we're kind of demonstrating that Finale's also, why Finale is, we have 40 plus integrations with selling channels and partners, so that you can connect and get the data straight from Amazon, straight from eBay, straight from your Shopify account, and pull that directly into the inventory management system. So that's going to be the other big why.

18:44

So as we move through the why, let's kind of talk about that topic of moving operations. Your operations should be moved into a tool like Finale Inventory. And as you see here, in these little blocks, it's kind of highlighting the different activities that you actually do as a business. So you have to normally create purchase orders, and you've got to communicate that to your suppliers. You have to fulfill orders, and those orders come in from various places. They come in from Shopify, Amazon, eBay, your websites, wherever, phone, manual orders. You might be doing wholesale distribution, B2B. So you're doing these activities, and we want you to think about, all of this activity leads to ramifications of you financially having to try to keep track of what you're doing. So if you do a purchase order, do you owe them money? Did you pay them, yes or no? Does your accountant know that you paid them? Did your accountant know you paid them before you got it, and it's the end of the month and you haven't got it yet? So there's a lot of information, and a lot of this activity, what I would say, the processes and the transactions that you do, this is all happening in your business, and typically people are either using spreadsheets or they're attempting to do it in their accounting package. And there's some big disadvantages to doing it in your accounting packages.

20:14

Why we want you to focus on a tool like Finale. If you centralize your activity in a tool like Finale Inventory, we have the ability to only give your people, the people that are actually making operations, access to only what they need to do. So your person that receives the stuff into the warehouse, and your person that fulfills orders, has no business having access to your QuickBooks or your accounting system. So we're really talking about centering your operational activity here in Finale Inventory. So that means you're going to shift a lot of activity away from your spreadsheets and away from your accounting system, and you're going to start doing that stuff to begin with, and from the get-go, do it once, and do it in Finale, in the right spot. And then we're going to move you forward into a better financial picture.

21:06

So things that differentiate Finale. Like, why would we choose Finale over my spreadsheets, or over my accounting system? A lot of it is, we want you to understand, is Finale is multi-location, meaning we support you with the ability to track inventory in multiple locations. Not only physical locations, like your warehouse, and maybe you have a brick and mortar, and you have a showroom, and you might be selling on Amazon FBA. So we'll help you track what you have at FBA, because we're going to create virtual warehouses for those. And if you really are expanding and getting busy, you may have multiple locations in your warehouse. Not just the fact that you can open the door to your garage, you may be opening the door to a warehouse, and you have to know where something is. It's not as easy as just looking at it and finding it. So Finale is bringing that with its location ability and its mobile barcode scanning ability. So when you start to scale, you need a tool that can grow with you, bring you the features such as mobile scanning, so that you scan it into the warehouse and you put it on a particular shelf, so that your order fulfillment team, when they need to go find it to actually get an order out the door, they know exactly where to find it. They don't have to have the knowledge ahead of time.

22:32

So the other things that Finale is differentiating ourselves with, you know, over your spreadsheet and your accounting package, is going to be kits and bundles. Kits and bundles are something that in ecommerce you should be very aware of, that you can drive sales by producing more listings for the same objects that you have. You're going to sell a red t-shirt and a white t-shirt, but then you also sell a red, white and blue bundle. So you might as well sell everything as many different ways as you can. Kitting and bundling is something that, when you start to introduce kits and bundles, it becomes difficult to track the order fulfillment for that and the costing for that, and Finale takes care of all that for you.

23:20

Finale also is going to enable you to do serial number, if you have that issue, or lot tracking, or expiration date. We can do that as well. The other thing that we of course focus on is the asset management and the COGS management, and we do that very well, because one of the things that we offer is weighted landed average costing, and we take you through that as the life cycle of you buying and you selling, and we keep track of that at all times.

23:52

Some people say, okay, so that all sounds great, but we will also want to point out some competitive differences that we feel are very important about Finale Inventory. One, free training and consultation and trials. So we don't charge you anything. There's no setup fee, there's no service fee, there's no training fee, nothing up front. You won't prepay for service or support you never get or never use. We also have no long-term contracts. None. Not an annual one, we really don't have one. So it's kind of like, this is month to month for you. And so what we want you to understand is, our success is 100% based on yours. If you are not successful as a business, and if we don't add value to your business, you won't have a need for our services. So we don't want to hold you into something that's not a good fit. And so we really want you to understand, we think so highly that we're going to add value to you, that we don't have to commit you to anything. You're going to stay because we're adding that much value.

24:59

Our US-based customer support by business experts is second to none. We do not have a call center. Everybody here is, we kind of say we're business experts. Every single person here, we have a vested interest in the software, and we're experts in our software. But we don't just answer the question, where do I find this or how do you do this. We become kind of like business coaches here, and that's why we think our support is so much better than others. And so, based upon our experience in helping businesses like yours, we're able to share our expertise and the proper ways for you to do things, and proper ways to implement. So we kind of end up being like business coaches.

25:51

Also, getting using our tool and getting your information in, we think a differentiator is we can get your information in here so quick, we think you'll be grinning and giddy. Because we have an import routine that we can get your data from your Excel sheets. We know you guys have been using Excel sheets, so we have an easy way to get your data from your Excel sheets. But if you don't have it there, we can also import it directly from your marketplaces and selling channels. And not only that, we think that one of the aspects that people like about Finale is we can tweak it and customize it to meet you, and make it more specific to the way you do business. So there is a lot of customizability with Finale.

26:38 Order flows, kits, forecasting, and the QuickBooks bridge

Mike Kroger

If we talk about an example of the operations, going to give you an example of how things flow. Let's just talk, for instance, the sales order flow. So this is kind of an example of talking about, if you connect Finale to your marketplaces, so something like Shopify or Amazon or eBay, but let's also consider that you may have a brick and mortar store. So you've got inventory in two kind of buckets. You might be listing all of your inventory that you own, both for your retail local consumption and the web, and that presents many challenges for you.

27:13

But let's look at the flow. So when you connect us to both things, like maybe a Square point of sale system that's in your retail store, and connect us to your Amazon, eBay or Shopify, then when people place orders on Amazon, eBay or Shopify, we'll put those orders straight into Finale. Finale will reserve that inventory, and we know that you owe that inventory. We're going to communicate back to both your point of sale system and update it that it has access to less inventory, but we're also going to communicate back up to your marketplaces. That means if you get an order on Shopify, within five minutes we're also telling your Amazon listing or an eBay listing that you have less available. The same thing goes through here. If you're using a point of sale system that we're integrated with, we're not integrated with everybody, but we do have integrations with point of sale systems, you can imagine Finale also has the power, when you sell it locally, we'll also go update your Amazon and eBay and Shopify. Because when that person just walked out your front door, you have less available to sell on your website, and we'll take care of that for you too. All the while, we're tracking assets and COGS for you.

28:30

So another key feature, when we illustrate kits and bundles, some people say, what do you mean by kits and bundles? So imagine that on your website, you're selling both this big carry-on bag and the travel companion. So you could do well just selling a carry-on bag and a travel companion, but you can do better if you also create a bundle. So you create something called the weekend luggage set, so your customers have a choice to choose from the weekend luggage set or the individual parts.

29:00

So this becomes a challenge for you inventory wise. Like, how do you update your channel to let them know the right number of bundles that you can sell, and the right number of individuals? Well, Finale takes care of that for you. And also, from the order fulfillment side, when you have a new person doing order fulfillment, and they see an order come in from your Shopify channel for the weekend luggage set, they kind of scratch their head and they go, what am I supposed to put in this order? I don't know what a weekend luggage set is. So Finale helps with that from an order fulfillment standpoint, by communicating to your staff that when that is ordered, they're supposed to get the carry-on and the travel companion.

29:41

Another key thing about using IMS or inventory management is going to be a key aspect of inventory forecasting. You're in business to make money, and you can't make money if you don't have it, and you need to make sure that your supply chain, you're keeping very good tabs on and aware of your supply chain, so that you don't run out. But it's also very important that you don't just fly by the seat of your pants or shoot from the hip. You need to make sure that you're not over ordering and putting too much money and too much capital in a SKU that doesn't move, when, if you would have been paying attention, you've got other SKUs that are moving faster. So you should put more money there, and less money in a slow-moving SKU.

30:30

So inventory forecasting is one of the things that Finale Inventory is going to do very well for you. We're going to help you avoid running out of stock. We're going to show you that we can understand concepts like safety stock, supplier lead times, mins and maxes. You deploy this type of logic to what it is that you're doing. We're going to also calculate what's called sales velocity. Sales velocity is going to reduce every time you sell a unit, no matter where you sell it. We're tracking how many you're selling per day. If I know how many on average you sell per day, then I can predict when you will run out, when you should reorder, based on the lead times we see from your suppliers and vendors. And then we also provide purchase order automation. This is a key differentiator in everything that we've been talking about. Accounting packages can do purchase orders, but they can't really automate those purchase orders. They don't help you create them, create them for the right amount, to the right vendor, and help you manage the whole process into the warehouse. So we're going to provide you with purchase order automations and also demand planning. So of course, there's lots of analytics and reporting behind us.

31:47

It would be also prudent to say, as you grow, when you're first starting out, barcode scanning, everybody understands what a barcode is, and people sometimes overthink it, but barcode scanning is so valuable and such a valuable tool. You may not use it when you first start out, but it's something you should really focus on as you gain momentum and as your sales volume goes up. Because the barcode scanning is going to increase accountability in your business and the people that are working there. It's going to increase your efficiency. It's going to give you the ability to audit your inventory and your stock. You know that computer systems, and even our software, and Excel sheets, they're only as accurate as the data that goes into them, and you're going to find that you've got to go out and do an audit and figure out, is what was here two weeks ago still here or is it not here?

32:47

So mobile scanning here with Finale, we have a feature, it's an app that comes from the Google Play Store. You use an Android based device, and it loads on there and interacts with our cloud, so it gives you lots of power. And another one that it solves for you is order fulfillment. One of the things, when we talk about what can this scanner do, it can not only scan a barcode, but I want you to think of the operational side of your business. You placed an order with your supplier, now the truck shows up, and you've got to unload that truck, and you've got to figure out, did you get everything that you ordered? And then you've got to put it away. So that's part of what this barcode scanner can do. We can help you automate the purchase order receiving.

33:32

Not only the purchase order receiving, but then imagine the other side, as it goes out the door. When your order fulfillment team needs to fulfill all those Shopify orders coming in, it's one thing when you're doing one or two orders a day, it's another when you're doing a thousand orders per day. So order picking is another great feature that the mobile scanner assists you with, because it gives your order fulfillment team the guidance to know where to find it, and it also validates and audits that they pick the right item for the order, that they pick the right amount for the order, and so on. So it keeps your inventory accurate.

34:10

Other things, of course, you can do from the mobile scanner is you can make stock adjustments, you can do cycle counts and audits, where you go out there and count, and Finale will tell you whether you're over or short. Again, keeping track of that inventory and keeping track of your asset valuation is key. So the other thing that we talk about with the mobile scanner is transfers. You've got to move something sometimes. You need to move inventory from one side of the warehouse to the other, but you also move it between your warehouse and maybe something like Amazon FBA. So there's also features for that.

34:47

So again, kind of to sum up this area of our presentation, and kind of get to more of the interesting stuff, we want you to kind of tie back to that same subject as we talked to when we would talk about financials. Bookkeepers and CPAs have a financial speak, and you as a business owner and operator have a different speak, and we're translating those two speaks. Meaning, when you have to pay a supplier bill, in our system that's going to translate to accounts payable. When we're keeping track of your quantity on hand, that's keeping track of the inventory value that you have. And then we talked about sales. When we pull in and monitor all of your sales, that's going to go to reporting revenue into your accounting package. And then of course, we're tracking COGS. When you ship something, not when you get the order. So when you get the order, you've got to fulfill it, but we track COGS when it's delivered or given to the client and it leaves your building. So that translates into cost of goods sold.

35:56

Other things that we talk about, Finale is not just all about those processes, but we're going to keep accurate cost, and we do that with weighted landed average costing. And at any moment, we have reports that you can run, that you can give to anyone, yourself, your team, your bookkeeper, your CPA, to show you the value of what's on hand. Not only can you show them what's on hand right now, you can run our reports and go see what it was on the 15th of last month if you want.

36:24

Finale also has a very sophisticated general ledger. The ledger is not a replacement for your accounting package. The ledger that we have is an inventory subledger. So we're keeping track financially with what's coming in your warehouse, what's still in your warehouse, what you're losing, what you're finding, what you're getting rid of, meaning AKA sell it, or moving it out of the warehouse. So all of that is geared around the activity that you do operationally. So as you receive shipments, that means that your asset value is going up, your inventory balance is going up. When you post a bill, that means that you owe somebody something. So we're translating all of that into our own ledger in our back end, and it's the basis by which we communicate to financial packages and to the accountants.

37:19

So that naturally brings us to, well, financially, how can you help me? QuickBooks. QuickBooks is one of the tools that we integrate with. We integrate electronically with it. When you connect us and you get it all configured, it's automatic, you don't do anything. Once you connect us to your QuickBooks, we're going to take all of that operational activity and push it into your QuickBooks, and your accountant, your bookkeeper and you will be able to see it.

37:51

So the information that we transmit, we call them purchase bills. The bills are you declaring that you owe the supplier money for what you bought. So we're going to push that into your QuickBooks. The bill goes into QuickBooks, you pay it in your QuickBooks. Other information that we're transmitting between Finale and QuickBooks is going to be, of course, customers. If you create customers in Finale, we're going to create them in your QuickBooks. If you have suppliers, the suppliers are going to exist in Finale, and we're going to sync those into your QuickBooks as vendors, so that those bills will be recorded against those vendors. Same thing, invoices. If you're doing manual orders in Finale, or you're doing B2B or distribution type orders, you can put invoices on orders in Finale. We're going to push invoices into your QuickBooks, so you know who owes you money.

38:41

Not only that, inventory valuation. This is key here. Inventory valuation is being synced directly out of Finale's ledger into QuickBooks as ledger. You're not going to see stock on hand or quantity on hand in your QuickBooks, because it has no business being there. You're doing all your operational data inside Finale. But the balance sheet and those reports that you look at, if you look at your chart of accounts in QuickBooks, you will see the dollar valuation that Finale is tracking, because we're maintaining that inventory value for you in your QuickBooks. And the same thing for COGS. We're recording that every time you ship, we're putting cost of goods sold into your QuickBooks for you.

39:22

So without further ado, I'd like to take this into a live demonstration. If it sounds interesting, if it sounds like too good to be true, hopefully I'll be able to convince you and show you a little bit here in the demo. So hold on here while I switch gears on the screen and get you to the right screen.

39:57 Brittany Brown

While he's doing that, Tamara and I are cleaning house right now on these questions coming in. So feel free to just submit whatever questions you have. This is your opportunity to ask whatever it is you want to ask. We will have an open Q&A, but we won't be able to get to everybody if we don't get a lot of them answered now. So please submit any questions you have.

40:16 Live demo: stock, velocity, and reordering

Mike Kroger

All right, so going to run through this rather quickly, but hopefully we'll be able to cover most of those topics that we went through. This is Finale Inventory. It's what you see when you first log into Finale Inventory. We kind of give it a big, nice, keep it simple overview of your entire business. Look at the screen from the left side to the right side, so it's the flow of the inventory through your business. Inventory is in the middle, because that's where everything kind of gets held and stored, in your warehouse. Things come into it on the left, and they leave it on the right. And you notice that it's supported down here by accounting and financials.

41:00

So when we talk about Finale Inventory, you're going to start by setting up Finale Inventory with all of your SKUs. If you're a product based business, we call them products, and products are where you begin. So everything you list up on Shopify or Amazon will become a product in Finale Inventory. So when you understand and you put your products in, then you're going to get your stock levels, which is how many you have and where they are, wherever they exist. Then you're going to tell us about how much they cost you. You're ready to start using Finale. You'll connect us to your marketplaces, which means that your sales are going to come in over here from your Shopify or your Amazon or eBay, or your manual ones. And then of course, when you start to run low on inventory, or you want to do something new, you're going to maintain your suppliers over here. You're going to create purchase orders. So creating a purchase order is going to communicate to them, you can email them right out of Finale. Once the PO is committed to and it actually arrives, you're going to do receiving. So there's an act of receiving. When you receive, we increase your stock. So that's how the whole cycle begins. But also when you receive, you can create a bill, so that you know who you owe money to.

42:12

And then this is all supported when you understand that you're bringing your product in on this side, and then it's leaving on this side. So order fulfillment happens over here on the right side. As you fulfill orders, you're going to pick it, pack it and ship it. And when you pick, pack, ship against these orders, we're going to relieve the inventory. That's when the stock drops, and your cost of goods sold is recorded. Now, to support all of this, you've got inventory management functions. So we always talk about, hey, how do I do an audit or a cycle count? That's with the use of a stock take. How do I just change the stock level? I lost it, I found it, I broke it, I gave it away. So you're going to be here, and you're going to do stock adjustments, no problem. If you're going to move it between your warehouse and the FBA, you can do a transfer. So that's kind of our terminology. And of course, remember when we talked about forecasting and the ability for you to do reordering, there's a reorder function here, that is kind of like where we're going to take you to see that forecasting.

43:12

But let's show you the really nitty gritty. So imagine here, you guys are a t-shirt company. You sell t-shirts. So all you have is a red shirt, a white shirt and a blue shirt. So here on this screen, I've left the main screen. We've got a product tab, and this is where your SKUs are going to reside. So where you see product ID, I want you to think of, that's your SKU. So we have three SKUs, and we've got a descriptor. So this is where you begin, you've got to create your products. Now, how you get your products into Finale is extremely easy. You would either create them manually, that's one way to do it, or you will import them. You will import them from a spreadsheet if you like spreadsheets, we're going to show you that in a second. But also I can connect directly to your Shopify, your Amazon. I can connect and bring your information in very quickly. We want you to also know that everything you stick in, you can get out. You can export anything right out of the tool, many different ways.

44:10

But one thing I want you to understand is, once you get your product in, well, how is this going to help you? So let's take you to the stock. This is like the visibility, remember we're talking about bringing visibility that you've probably not been able to see. This is what we wanted to see. So once you have your inventory in, I want you to see my screen. We have lots of numbers on this screen and lots of data. Let's zero in on what you want to pay attention to, and that's QOH over here. So when you see QOH, that stands for quantity on hand. So if we look at my red shirts and my white shirts and my blue shirts, you can see I know how many I have in the warehouse.

44:50

A lot of people say, but what if I have multiple locations or multiple areas? Well, what we want you to see is, you can expand a row and see at a moment's glance what's going on with your inventory. Not only do you know that you have 87 units on hand, you have 57 in a bin called A1, and 11 in an A2, and 25 in A3. So we know exactly where it is in the warehouse.

45:16

You're going to be able to see more than just your physical quantity on hand. So when you look at this quantity on hand, you're going to see some other numbers that Finale is telling you about. If you have an order, let's say this John Smith over here is a sale, this is a Shopify order. Well, John has ordered 30 red t-shirts from you, but you haven't fulfilled it yet. Because you haven't fulfilled it yet, it hasn't really left your physical quantity here, but we reserve that. So we'll tell you, you've got 30 on reserve until you fulfill this order with John here, which means that leaves you with 57. So in reality, you can't sell 87 more on Shopify or Amazon, you can only sell 57. So it's 57 that we're going to tell your website about.

46:05

But if you also notice, remember we told you about forecasting and visibility, do you notice there's a column here called on order units? On order units are what you have on order with your vendor or your supplier. This is bringing more inventory into the warehouse, and this order hasn't arrived yet. Now, if I look at this, you might say, well, when is that going to get here? And if you look, we're telling you when that order is going to get here. So there's an ETA, 10/31. That's the purchase order number, and this is the supplier that you've ordered it from. So you can see how we're doing math on here. If you take the 87 physical, minus the reservations, that leaves it was 57. If you added to the 57 what might come in from the future purchase order delivering to your warehouse, that gives you a global available to promise of 623. So you know what you could promise to somebody if they call you on the phone. Well, when that comes in, how many could I get now, today? That's the max.

47:09

So as you see, one screen is telling you so much information. Notice also, we're telling you the number of sales in the last 60 days, the number of sales in the last 30, and so on. There's so many pieces of information, we could kind of almost overload you with information. So when you also look at sales velocity, we are showing that you are selling 1.1 units per day on the red shirt, you're selling 0.3 units on the white, and you're barely selling any of the blue. And based on this velocity, we're predicting when you're going to run out. So in other words, if you average this much, you've got about 51 days worth of inventory left. But this isn't what we really mean by forecasting. This is just a way for you to know, are you good or are you not good? But also, remember to hear about costing. So if you notice, Finale is tracking costs, and we're going to show you how all this works. That's kind of the next step.

48:12

So as I show you how this works, and where does all this come from, let's jump into kind of showing you that operational data. So if we take a look at these products, I want to work you through a very fast example of showing you how easy it is to start using Finale. I'm going to imagine that we're going to add three new products here, and then we're going to walk through you seeing some information on how to purchase and receive, and show how it all affects the other things.

48:44

I need to also focus in on, when you click on a SKU, you're going to get to see what you're selling. And a lot of it, remember when we told you about forecasting, how do you know when to order, how much you should order? Finale gives you many ways to see this. And one of the methods is just you manually putting a minimum and a maximum. Okay, so this would be manually, you come in on every single SKU, you tell us a min and a max, and then Finale will alert you to that. If you put mins and maxes on all this, you could use our purchasing reordering, and this screen would tell you, you need to order these two products. So it thinks you need to order some of the white and the blue, based on your mins and maxes, and it puts together a recommended order, and you press a button and it would create an order.

49:40

But one thing we would like to bring to your attention is, there is an advantage of using an IMS system that can be smarter than just a min and a max. What if you're ordering when you really shouldn't need to? Does that make sense? So if you've made a decision to look at these products, and you've put a minimum and a maximum, and this order is 75, right, should you be ordering when you drop below 75, or should it be some other number? So what we want you to know is, Finale will look at your sales. And I'm going to switch the basis by which it's doing the prediction, to hopefully illustrate to you. If I change from a manual order point, I'm going to change the system to be using what we call sales velocity reordering. And as I make that change and I go back into my system, if I was to say I want to reorder, notice how the system says you do not need to reorder.

50:40

So I'm saving capital right now. Before, on my manual reorder points, I was going to order $1,200 worth of shirts, but my system right now is saying, no, you're fine. And you might say, what's the difference, why is the system thinking I don't need it? Because a while ago we had hard reorder points. Now, I'm going to show you, when we switch to the forecasting and the prediction engine, we're going to look at your sales velocity. And if you look here, do you notice how we're calculating that you're selling 1.1 units a day? Well, if I know that, and I look at your supplier lead time of 65 days, and then if I use that data in conjunction with processing days to get that ready in and out of your warehouse, if I add 14 days of safety stock, and I tell the system, when I place an order, I want to order enough inventory to last me 45 days. Don't order 90 days worth of inventory if I don't need to, but I'm saying order 45 days. If you give me all these parameters, then you see your real minimum is 88. That is your reorder point.

52:04

So if your real reorder point is 88, and your maximum is 138, and that's all based on how many you are selling, and how much safety stock, and your lead times. So if you notice, you've got 87 units. So if you've only got 87 right now, then you might be saying, hey, I need to order, because 87 is lower than my reorder point. But not so fast. Finale is going to look in here. You've got already an order with this supplier. You've got 566 coming in. So when you have 566 coming in, you really shouldn't be ordering, because you've already placed a purchase order. So hopefully you see how that's playing into this. And so Finale is doing a better job, and especially with these slow movers. Instead of ordering these products, you'll notice that we're basically saying, no, your reorder point on this product is not like 150, it's only 22. So you do not need to reorder, because you're only selling a third of a unit a day. So hopefully that's kind of illustrating how we're going to help you with reordering.

53:18 Live demo: purchase orders, sales, and the sync

Mike Kroger

Let's kind of show you something here I'd like to bring in real fast. We're going to run through this very quickly, and that is the purchase order. So what you do with buying, you create purchase orders. So if I create a purchase order, I can create a PO through the system. If I do one manually, I'm just going to create one very quickly with my favorite supplier, put an ETA of, you know, 10/25. I'm going to real quickly fill out a purchase order and buy some blue t-shirts. So if I want to buy blue t-shirts, let's buy 50 of them, but let's change the pricing on them. So if I change the pricing on these, meaning, hey, the last time I bought these they were cheap, they were $5.26, these are costing me a whole lot more. So let's say they've doubled in price. So we're going to show you how we're going to keep track of this cost.

54:11

We also understand that if you have other fees, this is where we're going to show you, if this cost you money to get to you, how we're doing landed costing. So you notice that it's not just costing you the $10.25, it's also costing you the shipping. So we're going to keep track of all that. But as you place an order in the system, once you place an order, you commit to the order, you can then email this to your supplier. But we want you to see how I've just placed that PO, and you'll see that when I go to the stock screen here, that this PO is now showing on order here on this row, and you can see that PO has got committed in here.

54:58

Naturally, if we say that this truck showed up, if I receive the 50 units, we're going to go from 60 on hand to 110 on hand, would we not? So I can receive this PO. If I go back to this purchase order, I can receive this directly into my warehouse. I can tell it where I put it in the warehouse, and receive it. Now that it's been received, we're increasing our asset valuation, we're increasing all of that into the system. So if I look in my stock levels here, you can see that we now have 110 on hand. Look what's happened to the average cost. This was at five dollars, and now the average cost has gone up.

55:39

So if I go back to that purchase order, let's also kind of follow through on the PO. So this PO that we're doing here, if we've received it, now we probably should put a bill in. So I'm going to go ahead and put a bill with a reference number of 23456, and I'm going to put this bill into the system. So I've now put a bill into the system, so that my accountant or bookkeeper would know I owe this supplier money. So I now have rounded out this purchase order. We've created a purchase order, we've received it, and we've even billed it. So if I look at this, it even tells me I've fully received it and I fully billed it. So I can complete this PO. So we've kind of gone through the whole life cycle.

56:22

And then the other side of this we'd like you to see is selling it. Well, selling it is the exact same. So if you've got orders in the system, then you would be able to create a manual order. It's very similar to what you saw in the purchase order side. If we want to sell something to somebody, we can sell them anything we want out of the system, and we can have a price that we sell it at, and we'll track all of that. So as we commit, if you say that they're ordering one, when you commit to that sale, if that sale came in, if that was a Shopify order, you will see that order show up here against the reservations out here. So you can see the orders that are needing to be shipped. And as you ship these orders, then the inventory will be depleted. So if you ship it, you can actually remove it from inventory. As I ship it, it will leave the inventory. And then of course, if you need to invoice somebody or bill them, I can add an invoice for this, and I have now invoiced them. So as I fully ship and fully invoice this, this is all leading to how Finale is tracking that asset valuation and cost.

57:43

So as we've been talking, and as I've been demonstrating a lot of this to you, I want you to notice how the inventory value, there's a number, we're kind of showing you the inventory valuation. So Finale is keeping track of it. What does it look like in my QuickBooks? So if I jumped over to QuickBooks, what I'd like you to see is, we have the ability that Finale is doing most all of this communication automatically in the background. So you might wonder, how do I know what's gone to QuickBooks and what hasn't gone to QuickBooks? If you understand that we can show you this at any glance, I can look at bills, and I can see whether or not a bill has been synced to QuickBooks. Not only has it been synced, but do you see this little doc link? I can actually click on this right here, and it'll take me right into my QuickBooks and open up that bill over in my QuickBooks. So you can see where that has made it into your QuickBooks already. So this bill that we started over here is already in your QuickBooks.

58:49

And the same thing would happen over on your invoice side. So if we look over here, we just did this invoice right here. So this invoice hasn't yet been synced. You can see it syncs every five minutes, so eventually that will show back up over in your QuickBooks. But the other thing I want you to see is, how is Finale tracking your stock valuation? So if you notice, I can see kind of like a valuation of $188,602. So if everything has been synced over here into QuickBooks, I'm going to give it a little refresh over here so the QuickBooks is kind of more up to date. If I take a look at my business over here, I can go down to my chart of accounts, and I can look at the assets. So if you look here on the asset account, we're a little bit off, and that's probably because that shipment hasn't yet made it over there on that sales order. But you can see how we're communicating directly with the information that should be updating in your QuickBooks.

59:51

So once this shipment gets communicated over here, this one has not made it into your QuickBooks. Now, Finale can force that, and I'll just force that for the practice of this demo, instead of waiting five minutes. What we would like you to see is, I'm going to force that to go. So once that actually goes, then we should have a truer sense of that asset value tying out. So as I refresh my screen here, hopefully we'll see that invoice go over. So now that invoice has made it into your QuickBooks. And so if we actually look at the chart of accounts over here, and I refresh this, it should come up and kind of match. So now do you see how our asset value matches?

1:00:44

So that kind of pretty much wraps up my rapid demo of Finale Inventory, and hopefully you got to see how some of the processes that you do here automate, and how we help you track the financials.

1:01:03 Audience Q&A and wrap

Stephen Brown

Mike, we've had a ton of questions. I've got one question for you. I know there's a QuickBooks desktop integration. Does that also work with QuickBooks Enterprise?

1:01:14 Mike Kroger

Good question. So here's the thing about QuickBooks. We have been working very hard over the last several years to improve that seamless communication with QuickBooks, and that is only enabled for QuickBooks Online. So it does not work with desktop or QuickBooks Enterprise. If you want to be using QuickBooks desktop or QuickBooks Enterprise, we would kind of lead you to the use of the general ledger, and you can run general ledger reports that you would make summarized journal entries into those products. Or we would encourage you to move to the QuickBooks Online product. A lot of people sometimes have a resistance to that at first, but a lot of that resistance was due to the fact that QuickBooks Online was not capable of doing inventory well. Here's the nice thing. When you use Finale Inventory, you do not need QuickBooks to do any sort of inventory management whatsoever. So that frees you up to just use the online product and save a lot of money.

1:02:23 Brittany Brown

All right, let me look, there's some really great questions here. Hey, Stephen, I want to ask this question real quick. Mike, we've had a ton of questions from different people who are talking about the integration options between Finale and QuickBooks Online, and talking about, like, maybe they don't want to push in every single sales order, and maybe they don't want to have to duplicate SKU information inside QuickBooks, but they still want to take advantage of the sync. Do you want to talk a little bit about where you guys are at right now, and what's on your roadmap for options in the future?

1:02:54 Mike Kroger

Oh yeah, great question. So the integration with QuickBooks is configurable. Meaning, when you hook us to QuickBooks Online, you can elect not to push any revenue into QuickBooks at all. No revenue. And so you can configure us to just push the bills, just push the inventory asset value, and just push COGS. So only push those three elements, don't put a single lick of revenue in. Because many people pull the revenue into their QuickBooks directly from the channels or the back ends, or they're using a third-party product that actually pulls in the revenue, and they just need Finale to push in the asset value and the COGS. So you absolutely can configure it that way. The other thing is, yes, there's even more hybrid configuration, where you can say, look, I want invoices only for my wholesale or my manual orders, I don't want any sort of financials going in for my ecommerce. So yeah, you can have kind of both, or a subset of your information, being synced into your QuickBooks.

1:04:04 Stephen Brown

Kind of fun to see how many of our questions have revolved around A2X and the Finale and the QBO world. It's fun to see that so many of our clients out there are really up to date on what the best tools are out there. I'm a big fan of that tech stack, for anyone who's listening right now, the A2X, Finale, QBO tech stack for ecommerce businesses. A2X on the sell side, Finale on the inventory and COGS side, and QuickBooks is the place to bring it all together. I know Finale is in the process right now of deepening their relationship with A2X as well, so it's really fun to see so many of you guys aware of these great tools.

1:04:39 Mike Kroger

Well, the other thing, and I think I forgot to mention, about what's ahead, what's coming with Finale. Well, guess what's coming. You know we push the bill into QuickBooks. What's coming in just a few short weeks is we're going to sync back the payment that you make in your QuickBooks, back out of QuickBooks, and we'll mark the bill in Finale as paid for you. So you get your triple matching and reconciliation, making that process easier. Not only that, but then we're not stopping there. Right now we're doing very detailed ledger entries into QuickBooks, and detailed transaction entries into QuickBooks. But in the future, we're going to be able to do consolidated journal entries and consolidated entries, to where, if you're a high volume ecommerce user with thousands or tens of thousands, it's going to be better to see one entry per day, or one entry per week or month, instead of seeing tens of thousands of entries. And Finale's going to be able to do that in the future, so that's also coming. We'll also in the future be able to support invoice payment syncing back out of QuickBooks into Finale, but also sales receipts. So those are coming as well.

1:05:55 Stephen Brown

So we've had a couple questions around integration with Bill.com, and Mike, I don't believe you guys have any direct integration to Bill.com. But I'm an expert in Bill.com, and the way that Bill.com will work, you don't have PO support with Bill.com and QuickBooks Online, it's only enabled with some of the ERP integrations with Bill.com. But when you create a bill in QuickBooks, it will also show up in Bill.com. So once the PO turns into a bill in Finale, it should get synced to QuickBooks, and then QuickBooks will sync it to Bill.com. So the way I would integrate these is Finale to QuickBooks Online, Bill.com to QuickBooks Online, and then you'll have the flow of that information, and you can pay from Bill.com and it'll make its way back accordingly.

1:06:41 Mike Kroger

That's correct.

1:06:44 Stephen Brown

One more question, and I'm not 100% sure on the context here. Are those controls done by user, or is it special service requests to your app support team? Maybe you understand what that is. There, Brittany, I see you're answering.

1:07:03 Brittany Brown

Well, I'm just saying that we're answering live now, because I'm not actually totally sure, John. We're not 100% sure on the question, if you want to go off of mute and we could answer it live. We've got all the questions answered in the Q&A, that's 50 questions. Thank you so much, everybody, for engaging. We're a little bit over time. If you have any final questions, you could feel free to ask another question on the Q&A, or we could even take it live via audio.

1:07:33 Stephen Brown

Okay, Brittany, do you see John's response?

Brittany Brown

Oh, let me see. Okay, great product and team. Oh, about the QBO, okay. Now I need to go back and see what that answer was. Okay, so, let's see here. Oh, we did have a lot of questions come in. So, about the QBO, are those controls done by users, or special service provided request to you by the app support team? So earlier, John asked, what if we don't want QB to track every single sales order, just weekly or monthly sales data, since our QB is not handling the inventory? Yeah, so that would actually be a question more for Finale. The question is, if they don't want every single sales order coming into QuickBooks from Finale, what options do they have? Can they sync over summarized sales, or is it only detailed?

1:08:20 Mike Kroger

Yeah, today there's no option for summarized syncing. It's going to be transactional in nature, very detailed, orders, etcetera, you know, very nice information, but it's not going to be summarized. Yes, you will configure all of that in Finale. So all that's controlled by the settings in Finale, on when we sync, what we sync, how we sync. You can control which sales sync by their source. So in other words, Finale enables you to track, and Finale tracks, where did the order come from. Did the order come from Amazon, did it come from eBay, did it come from a manual one you created? And you have control by specifying which sources you want us to push into your QuickBooks, and which sources you do not want us to push.

1:09:21 Stephen Brown

Oh yeah, John, we can hear you now.

John

I'm sorry, yeah, I think Mike is talking about, for those transactions, for example, if we only want to sync that information over there. My question is about that, whether we can just, like a check box, check on those, or it's a service ticket we have to send to your team, have them configure it. Just how much control ourselves. I'll unmute myself.

1:09:45 Mike Kroger

Yeah, I mean, it's absolutely there for you to do. You don't have to involve Finale. But you may want to make sure that you understand the ramifications of the decision you make. So sometimes, it can be so complex. Each person's financials and each person's business scenarios are so unique, we have found it very difficult to have a one-size-fits-all. But you do not have to involve us to make those changes. Probably the best way to handle it is, when we onboard you for using this function, we will teach you kind of the quid pro quo and the areas to be aware of, and where the settings are, and what is controlling what, and we'll give you that background, so that you kind of have a good feeling of, oh, well, I want to change it, then you know exactly where to go to change it. But we'll be happy to schedule configuration assistance for you. But you do not have to engage us if you do not want to.

1:10:48 Brittany Brown

We also had a comment come up about how people who work with Finale feel like they give a very white glove personal approach. I can second this to the moon and back. We've worked with other inventory tools. The support is absolutely unmatched by any other tool in the space, across the board, and that I know for sure. So if you are wanting to implement an inventory tool, and you fear, because you have heard the rumors about bad support on inventory tools, and you're not so sure you would succeed on your own, then Finale is probably the tool for you, because their support is unmatched.

1:11:29

One more. Can Finale auto ship a product sold on eBay? Can Finale ship from FBA warehouse? I'm assuming that's two questions.

1:11:41 Mike Kroger

So, can it auto ship if a product is sold on eBay? Yeah, so there's many different configurations. When you configure us to monitor or track your eBay sales, yes, there's a mode that you could configure, whenever you ship that order, Finale just auto decrements an inventory bucket. It can be configured to do that. As far as FBA, that's done by FBA, but what we do for FBA is we kind of virtualize FBA for you. So we show you that normally the product that's at FBA starts in your warehouse, or starts from your purchase order. So either way, we're going to show you how to track the inventory beginning in your warehouse, then you move it from your warehouse to FBA, FBA sells it, and then that we virtually deplete.

1:12:44 Brittany Brown

Do you want to finish answering his question?

Tamara

Yeah, I sure will. So, to complete Mike's thought there, we're going to keep a virtual clearing house, if you will, in terms of the actual inventory that you're housing at Amazon FBA. And each time there is a sale, we're going to decrement from that inventory location. So what we become, then, is a reconciliation point. So when you're looking in your Seller Central account, see, you know, what is my current stock that's on hand, what's in that sellable versus unsellable column. And if there are any differences in terms of what Finale is stating your inventory counts are, there are reconciliation tools that you're going to be able to utilize. So I think, in terms, if I'm looking at some of the additional questions you're asking, since you sell on eBay and Shopify, and all of the inventory, I'm assuming, is held at FBA, if it's all being fulfilled from FBA, then again, we're essentially going to decrement that inventory, we're going to be able to create those reconciliation reports that you can utilize. Because again, one of the common narratives that we get is, at FBA, you know, there's inventory, you ship it, and sometimes there's this black hole, where is my inventory, right? Or why am I short? So we're going to provide you with that reconciliation tool and report.

1:14:21 Stephen Brown

Tamara, Archer, he's got some follow-up questions, so he's on the audio now.

Tamara

Okay, great, great.

1:14:27 Archer

Hi, thank you for the answer. I think I got it. So basically you're saying you're gonna adjust the quantity on hand based on the sales on the other channels.

Tamara

Absolutely.

Archer

My question was about the auto shipping. Since you have the integration through the API, you could adjust the quantity, but also you could fulfill the order, pretty much push the sale. So if we sell 100 items on eBay, you could decrease the quantity on hand, but at the same time, you could push the data through Amazon and ship automatically. You're saying we still have to do this manual?

1:15:05 Tamara

Yes, absolutely. So you are still going to have to perform your fulfillment process. Right now, when you do that, we will then leverage that API call and pull it directly into our system, and ultimately mark it as shipped. But yes, you will still have to perform that function.

1:15:26 Archer

So I have a related question. I saw on your demo that you have a modular integration, actually on your website, integration with the shipping platforms, and that's what I was wondering. How exactly do you deal with the shipping? I don't know exactly, so maybe you can tell me.

1:15:43 Tamara

Yeah, absolutely. And this one, Archer, is actually going to be a great point to discuss in more of a personalized demo itself, because there is a separate workflow that we highly recommend as a best practice. But I'll utilize a very common workflow, that I would say 80 to 90 percent of our ecommerce users are utilizing today. That's going to be ShipStation. So your orders in all of your selling channels effectively would flow directly into ShipStation. Finale is going to see those orders, we're going to then pull those into our system, create those stock reservations, and decrement that inventory accordingly. Once those orders are fulfilled within ShipStation, we're then going to pull that information directly into our system, meaning we're going to fetch the shipping information, the tracking information, we're going to place that on those orders, and then we're going to close those out. And then that's going to feed directly into some of those reports, those transactional accounting reports that Mike spoke of a little bit earlier in the presentation, so that you can run your product shipped by source, with your cost of goods sold. And I see we have Mike back, through the miracle of technology.

1:17:03 Stephen Brown

All right, and we keep getting the questions. Does Finale have an optional fulfillment shipping module to use from our warehouse?

1:17:17 Mike Kroger

So, we do support you doing order fulfillment. The part of the order fulfillment that we support is kind of like the knowing where it is, how to find it, picking it, packing it. The part that Finale doesn't support itself is label creation, if that makes sense. So we rely on third parties, such as something like ShipStation, ShippingEasy, or many other shipping platforms, for you to do the actual printing of the shipping label. I hope that answers that question. But you can do things like print pick tickets and packing slips and stuff like that. You can do that from Finale. Many of our customers choose to do that in, like, the shipping platform that they're using, but you can do it in Finale as well.

1:18:13 Stephen Brown

All right, that wraps up all of our questions. What a great webinar, thanks for all. Oh, Archer has one more question. What about serial numbers?

1:18:23 Mike Kroger

So yes, Finale can help you track serial numbers. The normal process for serial numbers is, Finale discovers those when you buy them, or when you receive them, AKA put them into the system, into the warehouse. So the natural point of serial number discovery is normally when you buy products that have serial numbers. When you do the receiving process, that's the logical place, that's when you discover the serial numbers that you are receiving. You put them into our system and we track them. We can show you which serial number is in the system. And on the flip side of that is, then, when you're doing order fulfillment, which serial number did you give to which order, to which customer, and which was shipped out. And we can absolutely do that, so full traceability. The key thing there is, to do that efficiently and accurately, you should be using mobile scanners.

1:19:26 Tamara

Also, too, I'm sorry, Stephen. Also, Archer, I wanted to point out, don't forget, we do have that link, so that you can click on that for a personalized demo. We've had some really great questions, and we want to be able to walk through some of those solutions with you one-on-one. But I also wanted to expound upon the earlier comment in regards to utilizing ShipStation as your shipping tool. Since you are fulfilling exclusively through Amazon FBA, we can leverage ShipStation to automatically route your Shopify orders to Amazon FBA for fulfillment. So again, that's going to come around full circle for you, and we'd be more than happy to show you that process through a personalized demo. So don't forget to click on that, and we'll get you taken care of.

1:20:08 Mike Kroger

Okay, and also, about the barcoding. Yes, Finale can print barcodes. Finale prints any barcode, your barcode, our barcode. We can print QR codes, Code 128, UPCs, doesn't matter.

1:20:28 Archer

Thank you for that, now, for both answers. Yeah, about the custom barcoding, it's about all the returns actually ending up in our warehouse, and they're coming without the barcodes. Sometimes we know the original barcode, sometimes we have to make a custom one.

1:20:41 Mike Kroger

Yep, Finale makes that super easy, because you can do that.

Archer

Hi, thank you very much. I'm looking for this link, but you know, if I don't find it, please send it to me.

1:20:53 Tamara

Check the chat, the chat will have the link, and we will send this information as a part of the follow-up to the webinar as well.

1:21:05 Stephen Brown

All right, we've gone way over. Thank you, Mike, Tamara, for sticking with us. Brittany had to drop off, she had a call she had to jump onto. We were like, man, we should have probably blocked out an hour and a half, because you guys had some great questions. Please follow up with Finale, their link is in the comments. We'll also send out a follow-up email. Likewise, if you want to have a conversation with LedgerGurus about your accounting needs, we're happy to speak with you as well. And we hope that you all have a good day. So thank you very much.

Mike Kroger

Thanks, everyone. Thanks.