6 ways to Automate your stock management and production processes by using integration

If you currently either produce or retail your products to multiple customers or retail sales channels – the challenge of maintaining accurate stock figures can be a difficult mountain to climb.

With each customer/sales channel reducing your stock from their own systems – in many cases, businesses such as yours will resort to individual tally charts, spreadsheets, word docs, trying (in vain) to keep on top of all of the individual movements and requirements being placed on your stock lines.

You’ll be please to know that in most cases there are simple, yet effective ways of reducing the resourcing requirements of this task, and all involve using integration.

If you are not aware of what the term ‘integration’ refers to – quite simply – it’s a way of having your own system(s) ‘talk’ to other systems which are being used as part of your business processes, automating the flow of data between them and thereby allowing a level of automation to your business processes.

If at the moment you are managing your stock via several spreadsheets, or several systems which don’t talk to each other – then perhaps looking at one of many integration options is the way to go. 
If your stock management is a separate system to your production system which in turn is totally separate to your sales channel system(s) – then again, integration is the way to go!

Receta handles most integrations out of the box – so without further ado, here’s our top six ways of improving your processes by using integration with Receta:

  1. Look to integrate your Amazon FBA Account (if you have one) – Receta integrates with your own Amazon FBA account out of the box.  This means you can manage your outbound shipments to FBA and your self-fulfilled FBA orders automatically.  Your requirements to manually reduce your individual stock holdings in your own system, by comparing with your FBA stock totals is a thing of the past!
  2. Integrate your ebay sales (if you have them) – as with Amazon FBA integration – Receta can automatically pull down your ebay orders, create the customer, the sales order and the production requirements automatically.  Upon despatch, Receta will also automatically inform eBay of the despatch, send the tracking number and user feedback – all automatically
  3. Integrate your other sales channels (such as your own website) – in most cases, your own e-commerce store will be underpinned by one of several “off-the-shelf” platforms which themselves usually offer a form of integration.  The features available vary from platform to platform, but in general, they will likely offer the ability to pull the orders across from their system into Receta automatically.  As with the above integrations – pulling across your order information frees you up from any data duplication and means you can manage your orders in a central location.
  4. Integrate with despatch couriers – in many cases you will likely need to login to one or more courier systems in order to process your consignments and send your parcels to their destinations.   In virtually all cases, your chosen courier(s) will offer an integration option, allowing you to create the consignment(s) directly within Receta, using the information already store previously as part of the original order (customer name, shipping address, items to be shipped etc).  Receta out of the boxes integrates will ALL major UK couriers.  The days of needing to copy and paste address information between systems is over!
  5. Integrate with your accountancy package – In most cases, you will likely be handling the major finances of the business using one of several accountancy packages available on the market.  Products such as a Sage, Quickbooks, and Xero have excellent track records and offer all of the required functionality to correctly manage the finances of the business.  However, what you may not be aware of  is that the vast majority of these packages also offer integration options.  Receta integrates with all major accountancy software packages and will allow you to automatically push across all of the finance related data into them.  Info such as Customer Invoices, Supplier Purchase Orders, Stock Holding Totals etc are all able to send to your finance software on demand.  Again, reducing the new for manual data replication between departments within your business.
  6. Integrate with your customer’s systems – If your business mostly deals with B2B sales, you may be surprised to know that in many cases, your wholesale customers may run software which itself can be integrated into Receta.  Usually handled on a case by case basis – we have a long-standing track record of integrating with several third party warehouse and distribution packages.  In practice, this allows the flow of data between the two systems, ensuring both parties are aware of their commitments, stock holdings and various other metrics at all times – all in real time!

In summary – if you operate in any of the sales/logistic/finance channels identified above and have not considered how integration can help your business – now is the time!

By choosing Receta as your preferred ERP for your business, you can be sure that we will become a useful addition to your skillset within your business.  As part of your adoption of Receta, we offer on-site training to help aid adoption of the software as well as free video conferences, help videos and more.

Why not contact us today to discuss how Receta can help your business?