Initially, when starting out with a manufacturing company, it may be perfectly acceptable to use some white boards, Excel sheets, and intuition to manage your production process. As everything is in reach, fits in hands, and you personally known all the jobs. But at some point, all these tools become inadequate, and not only because they cease to be “free.” If you are operating your growing manufacturing company in QuickBooks Online, then you know that even though it does an outstanding job at accounting, it fails to offer all the functionality you need for detailed management of your production processes. You are not ready yet for an enormous and unwieldy ERP solution, but something more than Excel is required here.
Following are the top five indications that you should upgrade from manual production tracking and opt for x2x Lite Manufacturing.
1. You Don’t Really Know What It Is Truly Costing You to Complete Jobs
Are you making money through efficiency or because you happened to have good prices on materials? Without a proper tracking system, figuring out what a particular job costs you can feel like trying to guess after the fact. If you are relying on a monthly reconciliation of material consumption and labour to a job to figure out what the job is costing you, then you are operating with very little visibility.
x2x Lite Manufacturing solves that problem by tracking material and labour usage as soon as those events happen and tying everything together with QuickBooks Online.
2. Inventory “Shrinkage” An Enigma Solved
You purchase raw materials, place them on the shelf, and… they vanish into thin air. Since you are tracking and allocating inventory manually through logs, you cannot escape errors. Employees will fail to enter their usage, or scrap will be entered incorrectly. The result? You have “ghost inventory” where your log shows inventory levels, but shelves remain bare at the critical moment.
With x2x Lite Manufacturing, inventory allocation happens automatically. Every time a work order is created, inventory levels are automatically reduced. This ensures accuracy where QuickBooks reflects the same inventory as what you physically have on the shelf.
3. “Spreadsheets’ Bermuda Triangle”
How many Excel spreadsheets are you currently managing for your Bill of Materials (BOM’s)? The number of files that you need to manage and the problem with versioning (i.e., you are building Rev A on the shop floor but have the Rev C on Engineering) indicates that you are beyond your capacity.
With x2x Lite Manufacturing software, your BOM information is managed centrally. There is no confusion about versions since all your information is stored in one central location.
4. “When Will It Be Done?” Cannot Be Answered in a Manual Environment
Work In Process tracking poses a challenge in the manual manufacturing system. For you to be able to know where each order stands, you must physically walk over to the factory floor and locate the order. That will only work for a small production line.
x2x Lite Manufacturing enables you to keep track of the progress of all your orders. Not only do you get to know whether your order is in the process of being made or is on the queue or even completed, but also from your office chair.
5. Month End Close Is a Pain in Entering Data
If the thought of your accountant spending the entire last day of the month entering large amounts of time sheet and material usage data into QBO gives you a nightmare, then you’re wasting precious assets. Such an approach involves a lot of potential for typos and errors caused by tiredness.
x2x Lite Manufacturing functions as a natural part of the QuickBooks Online software. Your data from the shop floor is seamlessly imported into the financial application without the need for any data entry. Month end close becomes an easy task, not a difficult one.
The Bottom Line
Expanding is great, but it also means exposing potential gaps in your workflow. If all these symptoms look familiar to you, it’s high time that you started closing the gap between your shop floor and your financial department of manufacturing company in QuickBooks Online. With x2x Lite Manufacturing, you will be able to track the production process in detail while not dealing with ERP systems’ complexities.
