KEY BENEFITS OF INTEGRATING YOUR INVENTORY MANAGEMENT SOFTWARE WITH ACCOUNTING

Inventory management software has become an indispensable tool for many successful business owners who recognize the importance of accurate inventory management. Likewise, accounting software is invaluable for even small businesses, providing critical data on business performance. Inventory management software is a must for a business of any size, and so is accounting software to improve efficiencies and organize businesses smartly. Accounting software defines your company’s current standing, while inventory management software is used to maintain inventory health. Inventory management is about knowing what you have in your warehouse and where your stock is located. However, unless it’s integrated with your back-office systems, an inventory management system alone can’t effectively optimize your inventory nor ensure the inventory asset value on your financial reports matches what is physically in stock — at least not without manual, arduous intervention and reconciliation.

Many companies will already have accounting software in place and a system for their inventory management. However, these two systems may operate independently of each other despite having a lot of information worth sharing. In order for inventory management to be effective, it needs to communicate with multiple aspects of the business. Although inventory management software can track physical inventory stock, it needs to integrate with other business parts to yield the best possible optimization.

Two of the most strategic systems to link together are online inventory management software and accounting systems. By combining these two systems, it allows a company to streamline information efficiently. This will enable them to plan better and make better decisions. Forecasting can be more accurate, and manual reconciliation mistakes can be minimized. These two entirely different business components can be incorporated for better management that gives your business a competitive edge while reducing risk, saving money, and automating the processes.

This article examines why integrating both inventory and accounting software is so essential and beneficial for business owners. In doing so, we can show you how you can maximize the potential of both by fusing them using DBSync iPaaS for seamless and hassle-free integration.

Investing in iPaaS provides an enterprise with a Managed Integration Solution that can smartly automate the complete inventory management irrespective of your data sources and allows centralized control over the enterprise’s stock movement. It should also provide complete flexibility in controlling data integrity.

Precise and coordinated inventory management is vital to a business’s success, so the level of functionality that system alerts provide can be a driving force behind improving processes and cutting costs for the organization.

A sound inventory management system can be the critical difference between your business growth or failure.

The top 5 benefits of Integrating your inventory management system with accounting can be listed as follows:

Prevent Out stocks and overstocks situations

Optimizing inventory stock helps maintain customer satisfaction and avoid wastage. Storage and handling costs are associated with every inventory item stored. So collecting excess inventory stock will lead to unsold items sitting on shelves, which is a cost in itself and even more so if items become damaged or obsolete. However, on the other hand, having a shortage of items will lead to missed sales opportunities and disappointed customers.

An integrated inventory management and accounting software solution can increase data analysis accuracy and provide valuable insights such as sales forecasts and cash flow. Solutions with real-time visibility will benefit businesses in planning out more accurate inventory stock levels required for demand.

With the right amount of inventory stock, you can manage the expectations of customers and investors. Customers want instant satisfaction, meaning that they want the product available when they want it. They don’t tolerate waiting when there are so many other places to shop. However, investors want to minimize working capital that is being held in excess inventory. If your accounting system communicated with the inventory system, you could plan to have the right stock based on sales orders and previous accounting history.

As DBsync, we make this possible by making the systems talk. With DBSync iPaaS, we make sure that all systems get the updates when inventory fluctuates. For instance, customers using Quickbooks to manage their finances and Skuvault for inventory management can benefit from DBSync’s iPaaS integration, enabling bi-directional mapping between the two. DBSync has helped these applications to share data at the most granular level by integrating all these applications overcloud

One of the many COVID-era lessons learned the hard way by commissaries and other offsite providers, and their retail partners is that it’s more important than ever to know your inventory and to limit budget-busting waste. The value of inventory management systems has become even clearer during a disruptive event like the pandemic, said Joe Smirlies, senior vice president of Periscope.From a production planning and ordering perspective, a perpetual inventory position is used as a measure of reality on how product has moved from the shelves and is constantly used against any future need assessment which has to be also tied to the accounting software to realise the actual growth and strength of the company.                                              

Joe Smirlies, senior vice president of Periscope  

 

https://www.supermarketperimeter.com/articles/5812-the-latest-in-inventory-management-technology  

Reduce Labour Expenses and Reduce Errors

In a recent Harvard Business Review By John L. Neuman it was concluded that the key to a successful business is to make overhead cuts that last.  

Reduce Labour Expenses and Errors by enabling  automation
https://hbr.org/1975/05/make-overhead-cuts-that-last  

Integrating inventory management and accounting software means that many processes usually performed manually can become automated. This reduces the need for an excess number of hands-on-deck, reducing time pressures and error risk.

A significant part of a business’s expenditure is spent on labor costs. When integrating inventory management and accounting software, the chances of unnecessary labor-intensive manual feeding of components that relate to each other are reduced – saving time and money.

With DBSync iPaaS, you can drastically reduce labor costs and the risk of human errors, which directly impacts business growth and improves automation.

Provide visibility to supply chain partners

For companies with multiple supply chain partners, ensuring they have maximum visibility is key to ensuring productive working relationships. Allowing inventory level visibility to the supply chain partners will help them manage customer shipments effectively. The best way to do this is by integrating inventory management and accounting software.

Aside from its symbolic role – that is, in showing that you trust your suppliers with important information – providing this visibility also has a functional role. Fusing the inventory and accounting software will allow supply chain partners to see your fluctuating inventory levels so that they can proactively ensure you have enough to fulfill customer demand.

Compiling accurate financial reports

Every business needs to check inventory stock with accounting data to avoid discrepancies. Accuracy is vital for key stakeholders and investors, not only accurate financial statements for tax purposes. If there are continual significant discrepancies, then root causes should be investigated. Integrating your inventory management system’s transactions with the back-office accounting system will help remove complications, mistakes, and delays.

Any successful business owner will understand the importance of regularly creating financial reports to identify what is working and not. This is a difficult task to do without accurate information about inventory and accounts, so integrating inventory and accounting software is the best way forward.

By integrating both software systems, business owners, inventory managers, and accountants will work more effectively together. More collaboration and communication can mean more effective decisions, and it is these things make your business superior to competitors.

Easy reconciliation of data

By integrating inventory management with accounting software, you can easily enable data reconciliation, which plays a vital role in business operations.

Tracking your inventory is one of the most complex and challenging automation to execute. As the number of sales and purchase orders increases, it becomes much more challenging to track inventory item movements and stock-on-hand updates. DBSync IPaaS solves this problem and ensures easy reconciliation of data across all applications.

Work with DBSync and reap more benefits, as mentioned below:

Better ROI

DBSync iPaaS is the best fit for your organization and value add and the right investment for solving all inventory management  issues while integrating with accounting software, making it an easy solution which is time-saving and cost-effective

Enhanced Automation

Integrating two of your business’s most vital software into one platform streamlines processes and with real-time solutions, the data available increases automation in the business. The crucial decisions can be based on the output from the integrated software, uncovering potentially valuable insights for inventory management decisions and also allows for efficient and accurate financial reports that can be obtained effectively through the integration.

Determining your business’s right inventory management system and a strategy for back-office integration requires assessing your needs today and your plans for future growth. To achieve maximum benefits, integrating inventory management and accounting software solutions should be real-time, flexible, transparent to users, reconcilable, and scalable.

Fast & Secured Integration

DBSync iPaaS pre-built templates assist you in connecting your accounting software to inventory management systems within minutes. Our in-built scheduling and queuing of data flow ensure critical business objects like customers, items, invoices, and orders are not duplicated, and integrity is maintained.

A delicate balance

DBSync iPaaS ensures a delicate balance in managing your inventory and the accounting related to it. As any seasoned inventory manager knows, striking a balance between holding too much and too little stock can be a daunting task. If you order an excess amount that exceeds demand, you will have valuable cash tied up in obsolete stock. On the other hand, failing to order enough inventory to meet demand will result in dissatisfied customers.

This is where integrating inventory management software and accounting software will come in handy. By combining the two, business owners and inventory managers will have more to work within more accurate analysis and insights into the company’s needs.

Such integration will allow for more accurate information, leading to improvements in sales forecasts and cash flow. Further, getting this information in real-time will enable inventory to be assessed accurately in line with demand, purchase orders, and sales. All of this comes as a given solution by using DBSync iPaaS.

Conclusion:

With DBSync iPaaS, you can leverage seamless integration to provide greater visibility into ordering and fulfillment, deadstock, and safety stock notifications. Product purchase forecasting can be done using DBSync iPaaS by analyzing QuickBooks sales data and correlating it with stock movement over a specified period. The real-time inventory replenishment and movement status can be synchronized with all enterprise applications to determine product availability and reduce shipment time and cost by notifying.

We at DBSync are excited to empower our mutual customers with greater transparency, reduced errors during fulfillment and in handling returns, which ultimately enables them to deliver a seamlessly accurate, transparent, and efficient experience for all businesses

TWO WAYS: HOW TO CONNECT SALESFORCE TO SQL DATABASES

 

Today’s Salesforce users have more options than ever when integrating customer data with eCommerce, accounting, customer service and marketing SaaS apps. Companies quickly see the advantage as they reduce duplicate entries, helping to optimize the order-to-cash cycle. They can also gain that 360-degree view of customers, putting them heads and shoulders above the competition.

Even with all these options, dataops still hit Salesforce data workflow limitations due to inflexible integration templates and untracked changes to Salesforce metadata. This is especially true when working with SQL and NoSQL databases.

The challenges of cloud-to-SQL or other on-premise connections can have a company looking to devops and APIs for their integration solution. A third option is to leverage commercially available Salesforce data replication apps. These apps can keep your customer experience, operational and/or ERP systems up-to-date without having to pull on your devops resources or APIS.

Salesforce to SQL Database Integration Using iPaaS (Connectors)

The benefits of many data workflow solutions are they are no code and templated solutions. This empowers users to create data workflows with little to no coding knowledge quickly. The downside is the templated workflows usually are limited to the objects and fields included in those templates by the app provider.

Have custom objects or fields? Some Salesforce integration data workflow apps will allow you to create your own template. So the problem is solved. Right? Not necessarily. Even if you are diligent in keeping your templates up to date, that doesn’t mean your SQL database is up-to-date. You will need to understand how to keep your SQL database synced to include any changes to your structure/metadata.

Salesforce to SQL Database Integration Using Replication Apps

An easier way and more reliable way to connect Salesforce data to your SQL database is through a commercially available Salesforce data replication app. These commercially available apps let you skip the API and coding to replicate your Salesforce data to an SQL or NoSQL database.

DBSync’s Salesforce Replication app takes the experience one step further by offering an SQL interface that makes it an intuitive experience for SQL data admins. This app provides the peace of mind that data is replicated reliably with minimal upkeep.

If you are working on a data lake or warehouse project that leverages Salesforce data, download our SaaS brief that highlights how to overcome the challenges.

Accounts Payable Automation with DBSync

Why AP Automation?

This is one of the common questions that we come across if a company should invest in automating their Accounts Payable process. Well, the answer is, many companies out there do this!

Let’s face the fact that many companies do face a lot of challenges handling this part of the business and list out a few significant problems

·         Poor data entry – With many departments involved during the procurement of materials, the data is provided through unstructured data like emails, documents, OCR, RPA, etc. How to keep track of all these without any human error intervention?

·         Approval process – With different levels of approval needed during procurement, people often have to wait for a timely response to process the requests. This is a significant roadblock of mid-sized companies stretching their wings wide.

·         Storage – When most of the organizations running on “Cloud” these days and organizations with non-digitized systems, storing the documents and retrieving them is a challenge.

·         Handling Fraudulent Remittance– Even with all restrictions and compliances in place, there are organizations that still face issues with paying the suppliers before the receipt of materials on double payments. In the healthcare domain, there are organizations working with receiving paper invoices due to HIPAA compliance where they can step into different digitized methods of addressing this issue.

·         Time & Cost – Looking at the above significant challenges the primary concern for any organization would be on time and cost. How much time is spent to address these issues and investment does an organization have to continue with their current business model?

This is where Automating your Accounts Payable with different online tools, and available integration platforms help to ease running a business 

·         Start planning and research on what are the online tools that are available which can help you address the issues that as an organization that you are facing. Taking advantage of having specific applications to manage and utilize efficiently is the first step to resolve your problems.

·         Having an xRM (This is an extension of CRM like Salesforce or Microsoft Dynamics 365, which are very configurable and metadata driven setup) in the house would help a business to segment many parts of the company. An xRM solution to a business not only manages Customers but also track everyone doing business with you. Building a customized CRM or having a platform which addresses these would help organizations to have data entry at one point and maintain all their records at one single system
I do understand just having an xRM / CRM wouldn’t resolve how you can automate AP, but that’s a start for any organization who is looking to roll-on for the first time.

·         Organizations would sure have an ERP or an Accounting tool to manage their financial data. Taking off some load on what accounting does is an excellent step to get things on track in saving a lot of time and cost.

·         They are using online applications to tackle warehouse, shipping and packaging, a delivery confirmation. Etc is part of any organizations now that are looking to streamline their business. Using specific applications to manage different segments of the system will ease the business and help to track the progress easily within an organization.

·         For Healthcare sectors, adhering to multiple compliances would be a challenge and using different digitized way to transfer data outside of the organization can be done over emails, secure FTPs, secure ways to payout can be addressed.

Well, talking all of above on how can one automate AP and multiple business segments. That’s why an organization would need a solution provider to help you integrate and have all these data manage across different platforms. Automating AP would ease business in generating vendor bill’s, maintaining the item receipts, tracking shipments, managing inventory, automating payments, etc. without much human intervention and human error.

Auto scheduling of payments, send out reminders, getting the best of the systems to manage approvals are at ease automating your largest business sector. All these can be done when you look out for different applications that are handling these exclusive tasks for you. 

These would ensure your accounting is not involved in every step of the process. As the data can be shared across multiple systems, accounting would never be a bottleneck for any of your queries. And to make sure this happens, integrating your data with the platform can ensure you are in the right direction.

There are many surveys conducted helping us to understand that close to 35% to 40% of time and cost is reduced having AP automation.

With Data accessibility you can generate all kinds of reports and dashboards to be on top of your business and making use of different BI tools to understand how things are working out for you at different segments. 

Integration tools out in the market help you connect different applications and all data available across the multiple systems. One can question why should someone choose so many applications and have an integration setup between them. Well, my answer to them will be “ how easy is it to live in a four-wall room when you are piling up.”

Integration platforms can make sure you don’t go through the hassle of maintaining data with multiple entries in different applications. There can be real-time integration to make data more available across the organization.

You can get many integration platforms but DBSync being in the elite club of iPaaS space proving integration solutions connectin a variety of on-premise or cloud applications is subscribed and recommended for automating Accounts Payable. With many templates explicitly built to integrate different applications that I have mentioned above, they can offer a solution to the problem of an organization. Having a platform which can be leveraged to solve multiple issues of an organization can be fulfilled through integration, and I firmly believe these folks can do it.

How to use DBSync’s template library to get greater results

Have you ever struggled with an integration project? Well, you are not alone. Most of us do, particularly if you are like me an “integration citizen”.

The great news is that DBSync provides you with a powerful library of templates or PDLs, which contain examples for a variety of useful cases. You can import them into your workspace and run the projects as they are or, alternatively modify them according to your needs.

Accessing these wonderful templates is easy and straightforward. Just do the following steps:

Step 1: Access the template library

The template library can be accessed from the DBSync’s system main page via two different ways: the main menu and the Template Library button. Click on any of them, and you will be prompted to a screen with a list of the available templates

Figure 1: Template library access

Step 2: Select the template that you need

Now that you are in the list of available PDLs, you can search via keywords for a specific template or scroll down the list until you find what you need. Each PDL has a name and a description. You can expand the description by clicking on View More.

Once you have found the correct PDL, click on its name. You will be prompted to the corresponding template’s webpage.

Figure 2: Select the template

Step 3: Import the template

Each template’s webpage includes a more detailed description of the template and an Import to Workspacebutton. Read the contents, and if you are satisfied that it is what you need, click on the import button. The project defined in the selected PDL will be added to your workspace.

Figure 3: Import the template

Step 4: Check the project in your workspace

The project is now in your workspace and you can use it according to your needs. Check the content, such as connectors, workflows, etc. Modify whatever you need and run it. Your project has been completed!

Figure 4: Check the project in your workspace

Final words

In this article we have seen that DBSync provides you with a set of pre-built projects or PDLs. These projects can be easily imported into your workspace by following the above steps. Once the project is in your workspace, you can modify its content according to your specific needs.

Want to know more about integration? Visit our page at https://www.mydbsync.com/, where you can register for educational webinars or try our products for free.

How to integrate salesforce with jira service desk: custom solution tailored for your integration needs

In this article we will see how to integrate Salesforce with JIRA Service Desk along with the benefits derived from connecting these two applications, how DBSync is leveraged in connecting them and, of course, its best practices.

Salesforce.com often referred to as salesforce is a global web-based software and cloud computing company. Of its cloud platforms and applications, the company is best known for its Salesforce customer relationship management (CRM) product, which is composed of Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, Marketing Cloud, Commerce Cloud, Analytics Cloud, IoT Cloud, App Cloud, Health Cloud, Financial Services Cloud, Force.com, and Chatter.

The sales team uses Salesforce.com to manage their entire sales cycle right from customer account creation and opportunities associated with an Individual Account at various stages (i.e from proposal stage to closed won/lost). Similarly Service teams use Salesforce to track entire project lifecycle through in terms of resource allocation, project budgeting, managing change requests of an individual customer’s.

While one the other hand JIRA family of applications are used for  software development, feature implementation, bug tracking, agile project management (with JIRA Agile) which are the part of JIRA Platform. The JIRA software is often used by software development teams to manage entire development cycle. The JIRA Service desk is an support ticketing system used by support teams which takes incoming customer requests and automatically generates an Issue in it from where it gets queued up and assigned by a support resource who works with the customer towards the issue resolution.

All these systems work just great for each individual teams but become a big part of a problem when they are disconnected. Sales team software doesn’t integrate with the developments team software, Service team software doesn’t get integrated with the support team which often result in scattered data. The same information get entered repeatedly in multiple systems, not always accurately and no one knows what’s going on, often resulting in confusion while communicating with one single customer.

Any internal processes and softwares that are getting in the way of delivering top notch customer experience have to be fixed. Most of the companies are entrusting DBSync iPaaS to deliver first class customer experience which are internally using different software systems like Salesforce, JIRA Service Desk. So we at DBSync understood the importance of getting Salesforce to talk with JIRA system seamlessly which would help in tracking customer issues better through Salesforce only.

As a result,  We have built an standard template for Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk that provides out of box integration solution. This solution serves as plug and play to connect with both Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk to facilitate the seamless flow of data between two systems. The team involved in addressing the customer requests will have first hand information about the customer, project details, status of the issue and resolution steps that would make the issue resolution very faster. Hence, By providing better support you will have happier customers which will not only result in customer retention but also significantly improves your brand image.

Standard Solution Setup

The below are the steps to setup standard solution for Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk

1. Once after you login to DBSync iPaaS with your valid credentials, Navigate to the Template Library from the left side navigation which shall open the Template Library.
2. Search for Jira Service Desk & Salesforce Uni-directional template as shown in the following image.

3. Click on the View More hyperlink and import this solution to your workspace, On importing this solution will land you on the connector listing page.

      4.Now configure the Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk connectors with the respective user instances of Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk.

You can follow the step by step articles from our knowledge base to set up respective connector configurations.

Integrating Service Desk Issues To SF Cases

This section outlines the workflow rules within the standard solution of SF and JIRA Service Desk. This created workflow will serve as governing rule in updating the existing service desk to SF case.

In order to do that, I would leverage the JIRA jql in DBSync trigger section to search and filter the Issues from JIRA Service desk. As depicted in the below screen, I am calling Search API of the JIRA service desk and filtering the records basing on the update field which would fetch all the records basing on the passed condition.  

Now, Add a rule to map all the fields of Issues with the cases of Salesforce so that the DBSync can parse those fields and update the cases object in SF. I have mapped all the fields as depicted in the below table.

Salesforce Cases	JIRA Service Desk Issues
Project	Project
Summary	Subject
Type	Type
Priority	Priority
Description	Description
Case Owner	Assignee
Contact Name	Reporter
Internal Comments	Comments

Whenever you choose to run the “Run-Now” button from the platform or a scheduler job is triggered through set time interval, This setup would read all the last updated cases and upsert them to Salesforce as cases. It is now easier to visualize and track Jira cases directly in Salesforce almost in near real time including syncing many custom and standard fields. 

The former sections showcase a working model of business case for integrating Jira Desk and Salesforce. Likewise you can leverage the standard solution and build many customization around it. These are few of use-cases that can be delivered without much effort and time.

• New requests in JSD will create new cases in SF and vice versa.
• Update the existing requests in JSD will update the cases in SF, If doesn’t exist will create a new case.
• New Cases in SF will create new requests in JSD.
• Update the existing cases in SF will update the existing requests in JSD.
• Migrating data from Jira cloud to Jira server
• Migrating data from Salesforce to Jira Service Desk and vice versa.
• Integrating various objects between Salesforce and JIRA like service desk , organizations, customers, users, Issues and much more objects.

These are the few such use-cases which can be achieved using the standard solution for JIRA Service Desk and Salesforce but however you can do built many workflow to achieve an business case. You can leverage JIRA Core, JIRA Service Desk connectors of DBSync to connect with Accounting applications like Quickbooks, Dynamics GP, SAP Business one, ERP solutions like NetSuite, Dynamics AX, Dynamics NAV, Dynamics 365 and other application like JIRA software, JIRA Service Desk as Salesforce is the primary tool for tracking customers and their detailed information.

Do you have any specific needs of Integrating Salesforce & JIRA Service Desk? We have an standard solution and our dynamic platform which would help you to integrated both of Salesforce and JIRA Service Desk almost in real time. If you any specific needs we can tailor  the custom solution just by leveraging the DBSync iPaaS and JIRA set of connector without much time and effort. Do reach out to us through an email sales@mydbsync.com or via telephone 1-877-739-2818 to help you build the custom solution for SF and JIRA Service Desk.