man in a blue suit full of stress

man in a blue suit full of stress

Here’s what really happens to the sales side of the house when a dealer buys into an accounting system solution which “does everything.”

The Sales Order Problem

Your accounting system has functionality to create sales orders.  Sounds straight forward.  But to create a sales order, your employees will need to create line items to sell.  That may not be too bad for the box of screws you need from the vendor down the street, but think of the order itself.

All those boxes, all those selections that affect the cost and the price, all those modifications to make the kitchen work.

No problem says the accounting vendor!  We have miscellaneous items for that!  You can enter whatever your heart desires.

And herein lies the core of the problem.  That means your employees will have to determine the correct cost and sell for every component in the kitchen, then painstakingly enter that information (line by line) into the sales order.

Then the fun begins – some accounting systems only give you 30 or 40 characters for that miscellaneous item, kneecapping your ability to describe the cabinet correctly.  Others assume costs that need to be overwritten by the salesperson (which they always forget until the PO is created and now that the order is in flight it can’t be edited), and still others actually try to create some sort of working catalog which never works and is out of date within a month – and the list goes on and on.  There are thousands of little “gotchas” like this, and each gotcha needs a work around which has to be remembered and taught to new employees.

Which basically means it’s never remembered, new employees will always screw it up and profits will vaporize without a trace.

The One Line Item Mess

Invariably, everyone gets so sick of manually typing details into the sales order that migrates over to the one line item trap.  That’s where there’s one line item on the sales order, with the total cost and total sell, to represent the entire kitchen (which could be 50 pieces and parts).

Once this happens, your pick tickets and purchase orders are broken.  That one line item hides all the details you need to track the kitchen correctly and eliminate the sea of mistakes which happen later – as the job is completed.

Read part 3 of this series – where we see what really happens to our purchasing side of the house once that fancy new accounting system is in place.