Inventory Management Apps w/ Integration?
Hello all, My name is Kyle, and I'm the Office Manager with my company. Recently, we've made some moves to further improve the list of products that we sell, and services we provide. With this being...
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Hey, I had a introductory meeting with Ply, and they gave me a small guide on how Ply works.
Ply could be good for you guys if you have a lot of trucks that are stocked with hardware/tools/parts and kits. If you're anything like us, our company has a bulk inventory in our shop space, and we take what we need for the day from the bulk inventory and load trucks with that, so because of that, Ply doesn't make a whole lot of sense for us.
Ply would be best for electrician companies or other companies that have trucks that are mobile workstations essentially
Hey Kyle-Rottman,
Sounds like our company operates similarly to yours in terms of loading trucks from a bulk inventory in our shop. Did you find another inventory management system that works better for you? We were using Lightspeed, but they **bleep** us around with their payment processing charges, so we need something new.
Hey Luke,
Unfortunately we haven't found a good solution that works for us, so we're sticking with our Excel spreadsheet that my Excel wizard boss created. Both Ply and Arka CAN possibly be built out to suit your needs, but that would require a lot of R&D and customization. Those services are mostly meant for trades like electricians or something, where they have an inventory of stuff inside each individual truck or van that they have.
Other than processing fees and such, has Lightspeed worked out for you pretty well? I personally haven't heard of this service before. Let me know, thank you!
Hi Kyle-Rottman,
Thanks for the reply. Good thing that you have an Excel wizard to work some magic for you. We use Excel quite a bit too, but for inventory, I wanted something a little more user-friendly and 'live' so that all of our sales people could see real-time inventory data with pricing and other info. Lightspeed worked decently for us, but it is set up more for strictly retail businesses (ie. clothing store). We sell a small amount of our parts inventory to DIY'ers or other contractors who come into our store, but most of our inventory gets used for install or service work that our crews are doing, so Lightspeed wasn't a perfect fit either. What I liked about it most was the functionality around physical inventory counting. We could create partial count lists and complete them easily using a cell phone as a mobile scanner. That way we could bite off small pieces of an overall inventory count into manageable tasks without missing something or having to dedicate a large chunk of time to counting everything at once. The problem started when they decided that they were more interested in being a credit card processing company rather than an inventory management company. We didn't use the built-in invoicing capability of Lightspeed since inventory sales is such a small part of our business, so using them for credit card processing didn't make sense for us. And, I really didn't like the $270 CAD monthly 'convenience fee' that showed up unexpectedly on our account because we didn't use their credit card processing services! For now, I've just switched over to using QuickBooks for inventory management. It is nowhere near as convenient, and physical counts are going to be a nightmare, but at least it allows for live inventory management and pricing.
Hey Sam,
Yeah, that all sounds like a system I can't justify spending money on. Ply works pretty similarly to Lightspeed, it sounds like. I remember from my meeting with them, they had scanners for that same inventory idea, but they were crazy expensive on top of the subscription for the service. It's hard to swing that kind of money for something that isn't going to do everything we need it to do.
I've looked at QuickBooks as well, but like you say it's also not a perfect fit. Our company is small enough staff-wise where we can still get away with our Excel sheets. I hope you guys can find a better solution soon! If you do, let me know please!!
