Is QuickBooks Right for a Wholesale Distributor?

Question:
I am looking for the best software solution for my company. My (new) accountant likes QuickBooks. My old accountant (now ex) had our company's accounting totally "un-integrated". Accounts receivables in Maccola which I despise since most reports must be generated thru Crystal (ugh!). Accounts Payable, Payroll and G/L are run in QuickBooks but for some reason I can't understand it's not integrated. G/L entries are posted manually.

Our business is small: 20 employees, wholesale distribution; 6 stations; 1200 invoices a month; 900 inventory sku's; 800 customers; 10 salespeople; we need strong sales analysis reports, of sales per item and per customer; sku's purchased per customer; to send monthly to our manufacturers.
We also have a store for which I need a POS system integrated to our customer database.

So you think QuickBooks is the right software for us??? Thanks for any advice you can give us. The best way to contact me is thru email.

Answer:

I agree with your new accountant, your current accounting software is unacceptable for a company of your size. I played with one of the QuickBooks sample files for a while and I believe that you can get all the reports that you mentioned. I would suggest that you have your accountant set you file up, because to get all the information out that you want, the setup is going to be critical. Also if you or one of your employees plans on doing the entry, then you need to make sure that they are trained in the finer points of QuickBooks.

I personally have never had a client that used the QuickBooks Point of Sale Edition, but I have heard that it works relatively well.

Since you do both retail and wholesale distributing, you might talk to your accountant about the possibility of using 2 QuickBooks files...one for each segment, then combine them on the tax return at the end of the year. I say this for a couple of reasons:

1. Retail sales are subject to sales tax and wholesale sales generally are not, so their is the risk of screwing this up.

2. The reports that you want seem to be geared more to the wholesale aspect, so I imagine that you don't want them to be cluttered with women who come in your retail store to buy one tube of lipstick.

You could also use classes to distinguish between wholesale and retail, this would be something that you and your accountant can decide on.