Improve your Workflow, Store Owners

[burt]

What could be done at a Core Code or Addon level to help you to improve your Workflow ?

[14Steve14]

Whilst these may not suit everyone from a personal point of view I would like to see more addons made that connect to marketplaces, any of the delivery/courier services, any of the accounting packages, and no doubt there are more.

We could save so much time if we could just connect the site to Quickbooks to auto upload all the sales details.

Whilst we don't sell that much on eBay there are shops that list their inventory on eBay. I think there is feedmachine or something like that and have never used it and dont know if it works on all the sites out there, but it could be a starting point.

Also there are shops that could link in their POS system to the database for accurate stock updating.

Daily we upload a spreadsheet to Royal mail but it would be nice to connect the site and just leave it to do its stuff and even upload tracking back to the website. The trouble being is that every carrier would use something different.

All big jobs and would need so much support from users, or lots of people to keep on at some of the larger developers or the sites themselves to create something.

[Dan Cole]

We could save so much time if we could just connect the site to Quickbooks to auto upload all the sales details.

Years ago, I spent many days of my life and tried various software that existed to import data into Quickbooks until one day it dawned on me that I was approaching this all wrong. I didn't need to duplicate everything, I just needed to give Quickbooks some critical data that it needed for accounting purposes, ie sales, cost of goods, taxes collected etc so I created a simple osC report to generate that report on a regular basis and fed that into Quickbooks. There was really no need to feed customer information or individual product sales and other details to Quickbooks. I really didn't need two duplicate systems. That saved me tons of time and effort and I haven't looked back. That was probably 12 to 15 years ago. You might want to give that some thought.

Dan

[14Steve14]

Hi @Dan Cole Dan

We have tried uploading a few sales using the csv that Quickbooks says is needed, and it didn't work, and still took ages to match to a customer that may or may not have been inserted already. When using the import customer details as well bit, that went even more wrong as there were more than one customers with the same name and it had no idea what to do with the order so just rejected it.

We have also tried just uploading customers and that sort of works but then time is needed to add in one bit on info so we know which customer we need to allocate an order too, but at least its a bit quicker than manually entering all the information.

I spoke to my accountant about this and they said to keep using the feedback button and letting them know each little thing that didn't work.

I must find more time to look into this as it would be a great time saver.

[Dan Cole]

@14Steve14 I hear you Steve and remember the pain trying to keep both QBs and osC in sync. Looking back I wonder why I was trying to do that when entering the bulk details from a simple report from time to time gave QuickBooks and my accountant all the information that was needed. Realizing that customer, product information and individual invoices weren't needed within Quickbooks was a real eye opener and game changer for me. Good luck working through that and if I can help just let me know.

Dan

[lambro28]

We spent a fair amount of money trying to connect Quickbooks and OScommerce in terms of monetary values.

Rounding issues with VAT was the biggest bug bear, as well as how discounts, vat values on multiple items changed from a single value.

We gave up, although we have since moved to Xero, what we do now is create weekly totals now and enter the values in bulk. OK no good for stock control ( we have yet another system for that, which sends a csv file to the Phoenix database to update stock levels.). I wouldn't want or don't need to update every sale in Quickbooks, overriding the rounding issue for every sale!

[lambro28]

Whilst we don't sell that much on eBay there are shops that list their inventory on eBay. I think there is feedmachine or something like that and have never used it and dont know if it works on all the sites out there, but it could be a starting point.

Also there are shops that could link in their POS system to the database for accurate stock updating.

We use a custom made stock system, but as long as your stock system uses a database, you could easily make the two talk to each other.

We have just started on the ebay trail as we hold around 3,000+ products. You have to switch to ebays MIP servers, but once you have done that, again it is just creating CSV files to upload to Ebays server. You get your own log in and then there are folders to create / delete / amend / stock / price depending on what you want to do.

If you already have all your listings on ebay, it is very easy to update prices and stock levels. You can do this via ftp or manual file upload. We upload multiple times a day.

Looked into Rainers feedmachine, will probably get it soon, while it does not do ebay, it does facebook, amazon and others.

Brooklyn John is working on something for Amazon and others which he said could cope with ebay.
(hopefully I have not spoken out of turn and let the cat out the bag)

[AsTecModels]

Also there are shops that could link in their POS system to the database for accurate stock updating.

This is something I am interested in as planning on doing it on my other website. I am not fully clued up on how it works, all I know is it is done using API.