Inventory & Manufacturing Feature: Acctivate Inventory Software

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Editor's Note: November is "Inventory and Manufacturing Month" at Insightful Accountant. This article examines Acctivate Inventory Software that professes to operate like an operational hub for growing businesses.

Acctivate Inventory Management Software offers a combination of inventory, order, and business management features focused on growth, insight, and scalability centered around QuickBooks integration. Acctivate gives small to medium-sized businesses complete control over operations at a company-wide, real-time visibility level with business data centralized in a single system.

Acctivate provides a core of features designed to meet the needs of businesses that have outgrown QuickBooks inventory and order capabilities. They offer a modular design to allow their customers the opportunity to pick and choose the feature set that will work best for them. Why pay for features in a pre-configured product bundle you don't need if you can select only the features you want?

Looking at Acctivate Features

Dashboard Interface - Whether you need to look at summaries, details, or both, Acctivate dashboards are a dynamic, interactive solution that enables you to gain insight and make better business decisions:

  • One screen information saves time and conveniently keeps you informed
  • View data from every area of the company, or only one – you decide
  • Quickly identify issues and take action to resolve them
  • Gain better visibility into remote offices and operations
  • Real-time information available when you are – no more next morning reports
  • Eliminates the clutter – enables users to focus on their environment
  • Don't be constrained by our imagination – use your own.
  • Almost limitless possibilities and uses by creating custom widgets
  • Dashboard personalization

Integration with QuickBooks - Acctivate does not routinely sync with the Items in QuickBooks. Once the initial sync is done, all active items are copied to Acctivate, including the quantity on hand and value inventory in QuickBooks. Then QuickBooks items are turned off, and Acctivate takes full responsibility for all Inventory Management. Journal entries, Sales Orders, and Purchase Invoices will reference the Product Class assigned to the products in your inventory. Therefore, you will see the Product Class list in your Item List in QuickBooks. Any transactions that affect inventory, including transactions to the Inventory asset account, must be handled only in Acctivate to ensure that Acctivate and QuickBooks are kept in balance. When transactions are posted from Acctivate to QuickBooks, you do not see the part numbers; if you want to print the invoice or run any item-specific reports, you must do so from Acctivate.

Acctivate's Business Insights & Activities Features - Acctivate prides itself on providing business insight tools that bring on-demand visibility of each business to the forefront enabling informed decisions to be made. Acctivate's event timelines deliver a simplified view of historical and active data along with critical insights.

Business activities manage and track any activity, issue, follow-up, event, or project. Each time users log into Acctivate, they are presented with a current list of alerts and business activities. Business activities help you assign, manage and track activities throughout the organization. For example, business activities will track your projects and tasks, and then business alerts will make sure you never miss a deadline again.

  • Business Activity Management – Creates an electronic folder that can track sales, Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMAs), service calls, and more in one place. This is for activities that involve several people or take place over some time. Track notes, changes in status, emails, etc.
  • Business Activity Scheduling - Acts as a scheduling board for assigning business activities. For example, if there are five service techs, scheduling provides a panel to schedule service activities among the different service techs.
  • Business Activity Service Billing - This allows for billing of time and material charges within a business activity.

Business Decision Support - Acctivate decision support tools simplify the decision-making process by providing easy access to real-time business intelligence across all areas of your company. Get personalized, helpful information for each user, delivered with a flexible, simple-to-use interface, allowing every organization member to gain the knowledge they need to make better decisions – whether dealing with vendors, prospects, customers, or employees.

Sales and Customer Management- Sales management and order fulfillment tools integrated with inventory control software can be the sales team's secret weapon in an ever-increasingly competitive environment. Real-time access to accurate inventory and product information keeps orders flowing and customers happy & away from competitors.

  • Lead Management - Acctivate has a set of customizable contact and lead management tools that enable company-wide visibility, access, management, and analysis into the sales and account management process.
  • Customer Sales - When the customer is ready to buy, they want the process to be handled quickly, accurately, efficiently, and via their preferred channel, sometimes mandated. That may mean shopping online, by phone, by fax, through the mail, from a catalog or, at a retail counter, from a salesperson, or, for some businesses, buying is an automated process using EDI. The key to effectively handling all sales channels with accuracy & consistency is centralizing – having the data, including inventory quantities, in one location.
  • Sales orders - The power of a sales management system directly integrated with inventory and other company areas is most apparent at the time of the sale. Quotes are converted to sales orders with Acctivate's one-click conversion process – even for orders with complex components, parts, or configurations. As a result, sales orders are handled efficiently, accurately, and quickly with real-time access to inventory, credit management, shipping information, and customer history at your fingertips.
  • Mobile Sales Orders – Create sales orders from a mobile device while at a customer's location, a trade show, or in your showroom.
  • Retail counter sales - Counter sales, returns, and exchanges can be handled quickly with multiple payment options, barcode scanning, special handling or shipping instructions, and sales tax management. A variety of supported hardware is available to streamline Point-of-sale operations.

Purchasing Management - Acctivate's purchasing management software is a repository of purchasing history information that all authorized company personnel can access. Streamline the complexities of purchasing management with dynamic purchasing management software for managing: requisitions, quote requests, purchase orders, receiving, and alerts. Purchase orders can also be created based on pre-established reorder policies and procedures using preferred vendors and inventory reorder alerts.

  • Drop-ship/Special Order Wizard - Acctivate's drop ship purchasing wizard is a powerful tool that automatically creates purchase orders for drop shipments (ship from your vendor to your customer) or special orders (for products that you do not keep in stock but order when you get a sales order for the product) from line items on the sales order.
  • Inventory Forecasting - Acctivate helps you ensure you have enough of the proper inventory on hand, without having too much, to fulfill sales when sales happen. With tools that simplify forecasting & sales trend analysis, you get it right, and ordering new products or reorders is a quick, easy process. The result is increased forecast accuracy, reduced inventory purchasing errors, reduced inventory levels, improved customer service, and reduced out of stocks.

Inventory Control - Inventory control affects the entire business and your customers, not just your warehouse. Having the correct inventory in the right quantities, and keeping it under control, can be the differentiator in customer satisfaction and is a crucial driver for increased productivity and profitability.

Some specialized inventory related features include:

  • Advanced Cost Method Options - offering flexible inventory cost tracking and control across your entire business. Choose from five cost methods including average cost, standard cost, FIFO, LIFO, and Specific Identity cost.
  • Catch-weight - Catch-weight, or variable weight, is typically used for food or other items where each item has a different weight, and the items are stocked by piece and priced by weight.
  • Kitting & Assemblies - Whether products are made to stock (assemblies), made on-demand (kitting), or a combination of the two, Acctivate controls the inventory and provides visibility on sales, margins, availability, and anticipated prices current and future component inventory requirements.
  • Landed cost - Landed cost, or actual cost, is the process of capturing all costs associated with the acquisition of goods, enabling businesses to accurately calculate inventory valuation by including these associated costs, whether the costs are known at the time of receipt of the goods, or sometime after.
  • Matrix Inventory - Used in various industries – apparel, jewelry, footwear, paint manufacturing, flooring, sporting goods – anywhere color, size, style, or pattern variations require complex inventory control and tracking capabilities.
  • Pricing Flexibility - Create, manage, control, and monitor pricing decisions across the company by segment, product, or customer with Acctivate. Each price can be a specific dollar value, a discount from list, or a markup from cost. Customer tiered pricing can have an unlimited number of tiers and can be specific to a single product or a group of products. Any number of quantity break prices. Point-of-transaction up-charge or discount capabilities. Cost-plus calculations. Users can be 'constrained' to the choice of price or granted rights of manual price overrides. Pricing approval options are also available.
  • Trace & Track with Serial, Lot Numbers, and Expiry Dates- Acctivate's powerful lot number and serial number tracking capabilities, combined with Acctivate's barcoding functionality, form one of the most robust yet affordable solutions available to businesses requiring lot and serial number management with traceability. You can also record and manage expiration dates by lot number or serial number.

Manufacturing Functionality – Acctivate includes basic manufacturing functionality within its Standard Assembly feature. This includes the ability to create finished goods inventory for an item from one or more raw material inventory components. The raw materials (components) are allocated to Work in Process inventory during production, restricting them from other assemblies and/or sales orders. Component inventory may be selected from multiple warehouses, workflow status can be tracked and multiple items/transactions can be managed under a single session. Acctivate uses the term session to represent a single production run or batch.  Each session may contain transactions involving multiple items, lots or serial numbers.

  • Custom fabrication – Vary Bills-of materials by adding, removing, or changing component parts or quantities, automatically maintaining traceability of lot/serial numbers for components and resultant finished products, and efficiently managing refurbishment or disassembly. Custom Assemblies expands upon the Standard Assembly functionality by giving you the ability to manage the design, specifications and production of configurable products. It permits a configurable Bill of Materials (BOM) to be easily established for custom built products, which can be adjusted appropriately to record the actual build. Acctivate supports both build-for-stock and build-to-order manufacturing.  
  • Process manufacturing –  Acctivate supports Process Manufacturing, primarily for the food, beverage and medical industries. Handles conditional recipe or formula variations, records the actual ingredients used at production, manages waste and spoilage, automatically maintains the traceability of ingredient and production batch/lot numbers, tracks expirations, and records the resulting yield quantities. Process Assemblies enable you to managed a variable bill of materials, similar to Custom Assemblies.

Warehouse Management - Acctivate software is the most advanced inventory & warehousing software available to the small and mid-market, enabling your business with multi-channel order management & fulfillment, real-time visibility, barcoding, workflow management, and flexible warehouse organization.

  • Multiple Locations – Track inventory in any location below the primary site/warehouse, including aisle, rack, shelf, bin, trucks, or other defined areas.
  • Warehouse Layout Editor – Define the aisles, walls, end caps, bin locations and walking paths of your entire warehouse by letting Acctivate intelligently map the best routes for your picking orders.

Order Fulfillment - Pick accuracy, and on-time shipping are the last critical steps before the moment of truth when the customer receives the order. Acctivate's order fulfillment tools are designed to reduce errors, eliminate bottlenecks, optimize worker productivity and assist in the process of satisfying customers time and again. With Acctivate's fully-integrated picking, shipping, and shipment tracking capabilities, you'll gain the competitive advantage of flexible, reliable, and cost-effective order fulfillment.

Barcoding and Warehouse Mobile features - Acctivate supports leading barcoding hardware devices, scanners, and printers. Acctivate is built on a flexible foundation that allows the system to understand your specific environment and then permits a custom barcoding solution to meet your business needs, goals, and budget. In addition, adding barcoding software and workflow management to the order fulfillment streamlines the process:

  • Mobile Receiving – Use wireless handheld devices to receive products.
  • Pick in progress - Pick the product on each sales order using a handheld barcode reader capturing the product barcode, bin barcode, or lot or serial number barcodes.
  • Picked – Use wireless handled devices to pick and process outbound orders. Order. Order & address information is automatically available for printing labels without re-keying of data.

Shipped - Order is shipped, tracking information is automatically supplied to Acctivate from FedEx, UPS, USPS, ShipRush, or DHL workflow status is changed to shipped, and the order is ready to be invoiced.

International Ready - Running an import or export business can be complex. It can be a challenge to capture all the costs, manage inventory, handle customers, create pricing structures, and do it all efficiently and profitably. Acctivate helps importers and exporters of all sizes buy and sell globally with ease and efficiency by:

  • Landed Costs - Calculate the actual cost & profitability of goods with landed cost.
  • Multi-currency Support - Implement a multi-national pricing strategy with the most comprehensive multi-currency solution available for small & mid-sized importers.
  • EDI Compatibility - Automate routine tasks & eliminate re-keying of documents with fully-compliant EDI.

E-Commerce and EDI Integration - Acctivate integrates with many major E-commerce platforms, such as Magento, Amazon Services, eBay, and many more. Orders, tracking information, product availability, and customers are synchronized between Acctivate & your web store with one click.

  • Web Store Integration - Integrates Acctivate seamlessly to eCommerce platforms, such as Big Commerce, Magento Commerce, ASPDotNetStoreFront, Volusion, Woo Commerce and many more. No connection through a third-party vendor.
  • EDI Sales/Purchasing/3PL Transactions – Import orders from your EDI Provider into Activate using the most frequent EDI translations. Export purchases from Acctivate to your EDI Provider and vendor trading partners. Map 940 warehouse orders to your 3rd-party Logistics Company with returning EDI confirmations.

Platform or Cloud Options – Activate is available on-premise or in the cloud, letting you choose which deployment is right for your business:

  • On-premise Platform - Acctivate was designed using top industry technology under an approach to ensure application longevity, flexibility, and performance. The technology beneath Acctivate is robust, secure, and accelerates the value delivered to customers today and in the future. Acctivate supports Microsoft Windows and all Microsoft Server Operating Systems.
  • Cloud Option - Acctivate brings decades of business, technology & accounting knowledge to the cloud by offering growing companies the tools they need to manage their businesses more effectively and improve inventory controls, productivity, and profitability. This option puts real-time access to prospects, customers, vendors & company performance at your fingertips. It allows you to manage your sales pipeline including customer orders, returns, communications, issues, and history for everyone in the company from anywhere via the internet.

Reporting - Acctivate's reporting and document management capabilities were designed around Crystal Reports, providing Acctivate users the ability to develop advanced, integrated reports and documents with professional design quality & branding. Acctivate includes over 100 reports & documents out of the box, including a customizable dashboard AND the ability to create virtually any report or document with Crystal Reports® eliminating all restrictions to getting the information you need the way you want it. In addition, Acctivate provides fully-integrated, real-time access to company-wide information.

  • Reports are easily accessible within each category module (sales, purchasing, etc.) and are also housed within the Report Catalog, a system library that contains all reports and documents
  • Report filtering: Report data can be filtered to limit what is presented to achieve a more customized user view of the information
  • Printer assignments define a default printer for each report

In Conclusion

Acctivate adapts to increased demands and growth with a flexible and scalable design, not only supporting a virtually unlimited number of users, locally and globally but enabling the addition of new features without significant changes to handle substantial growth or change in your business volume or structure. It's modular design and configuration means that you pay for the features you want and need, and not those that the developers simply want to charge you for. When it's' time to add features, just plug them in to gain functionality to meet your demands. 

So, if you have been looking for a sophisticated inventory and manufacturing add-on to QuickBooks that you can configure exactly the way you want, be certain to check out Acctivate, it might just be the solution that fits your requirements.

Acknowledgements and Disclosures:

Graphics and content used within this feature was derived and/or adapted by the author in part from Acctivate source materials including Acctivate Help & Support Documentation, the Acctivate Onboarding Guide, Acctivate Updates, Acctivate Knowledge Base, Acctivate Training Resources, Acctivate Website content, and Acctivate 'Free Trial' related content. Adapted source materials published within this feature by Insightful Accountant are for educational and product promotional purposes only.

Acctivate, as used herein, refers to ACCTivate!® a registered trademark of Alterity, Inc., a private company registered in Arlington, Texas.

QuickBooks, as used herein, refers to one or more registered trademarks of Intuit, Inc., a publicly traded corporation headquartered in Mountain View, California.