5 Signs You Need Fashion ERP to Upgrade Your Quickbooks & Excel Setup

QuickBooks is perhaps one of your first friends in starting your business ventures, but you’ll notice it can’t keep up with your demands of efficient operation or satisfy your intricate management needs of your ever-growing fashion business. And with your lingering #NewYearNewMe attitude, you need a gentle push in meeting your resolution of a faster, more sufficient, and more accurate integrated system to manage your apparel business.

If you raise your hand and say, “That’s me” to any of the following experiences, it’s time to augment QuickBooks with AIMS360’s apparel software.

1. You Spend a Lot of Time Manually Managing Apparel Inventory

Let’s start with your product. It’s a no-brainer that you will have a sea of products that vary in style, colors, and sizes. QuickBooks works at the size level making style, color, and sizes difficult to use in QuickBooks. QuickBooks is not apparel software so it does not handle the inventory matrix for fashion. You will spend more time than needed creating a new product for every color and size, which is extremely repetitive. This also means orders and invoices are too complicated and complex looking, inventory is difficult at best and there is no way to get a real ‘open to sell by date’ report by product and/or color/size.

2. You Get Headaches from Manually Managing Domestic and Import Fashion Production

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If you barely have enough time to manually manage apparel inventory, just thinking about manually managing fashion production already gives you a headache. You have the chaos of apparel production, late deliveries, too much or not enough in production, and delayed shipping. With a fashion business management software, you get a full apparel production tracking system that is integrated with your orders. It gives you the ability to specify a delivery window for your apparel production, so you know what is coming when, if you have too much, or too little. You see it all in one system. No more jumping back and forth between Excel sheets. AIMS360 apparel software can also be used as a fashion PLM for apparel production management.

3. Your Fashion Business is Omni-Channel

Your fashion business is omnichannel, but Quickbooks and Excel can’t handle the process like an apparel software. So, you find yourself entering apparel production and apparel order information to QuickBooks, and using multiple excel sheets for tracking. Both Quickbooks and Excel lack a fully integrated system to easily communicate with your business and your different partnerships. Too many apparel sales channels mean too much time wasted on entering your orders multiple times instead of focusing on other areas of your business. An apparel software is the only way to have a more sophisticated way of communication to make your orders talk to your apparel inventory, apparel production, customer service, factors, EDI, Shopify, DTC, B2B, and more.

4. You Have to Guess Who to Ship, With No Ability for Intelligent Allocation and Fulfillment

Besides the pain of double entering apparel order information, you find a huge lack of visibility in your apparel inventory or units you have currently and which customer it should go to. With QuickBooks and Excel, this can get overly complicated. That’s where adding an apparel software in the mix can help. AIMS360 has an intelligent fashion order allocation and fulfillment system that connects orders to fashion purchasing and fashion production based on the rules you set. Plus, you’ll earn some brownie points since your apparel warehouse manager no longer need to chase things down.

5. You Have Too Many Excel Sheets to Name

A fashion business operates under a whole new set of metrics — you need easy access to these metrics for a variety of purposes: reporting to the “board”, identifying opportunities, and to be within reach of your business budgeting and finances, to name a few. Simply put you need an apparel software with a single source of truth about your company.

Apparel software provides the necessary reporting along with options for Business Intelligence that lets you easily drive your business forward at a glance. Why spend time with multiple Excel sheets trying to figure out inventory levels, where your apparel production is at or when it’s coming in when you can use a fashion software to get this information quickly and painlessly in one place. You need results that will drive your business on a successful track! And with the right fashion software, it can produce detailed metrics, giving you straightforward answers like the most and least profitable colored, pocketed, two-buttoned cardigan you distributed last season.

If you can relate to any of these five experiences, it’s time to move up from QuickBooks and Excel. AIMS360 apparel software offers a smooth integration with your QuickBooks file and Excel sheets that will become the extra hands in fulfilling your fashion business management needs you didn’t know you had.