Inventory Sync Options

Hi,



I am looking for a solution to keep my warehouse stock accurate so if there is a problem on my cs cart stock i would know the difference and will be able to sync with my warehouse stock to keep it up to date and accurate to avoid overselling of products. I cannot seem the find a proper solution, can you please advise me and anyone who is using a current solution for the same purpose, I would be very gratefull.



Thanks

Wow, that's a big question.

This is a business decisions to be made that is unique to each business's budget and need.

Traditionally you would operate software that manages your inventory in your warehouse. It is the software that you receive inventory into and debit inventory from with invoices.



Then you would create a sync function between your warehouse software and your web store which can push out inventory quantities to your web store. It may also import invoices and customers. It may also push out shipment info and status updates on your web orders, it may even push out inventory updates (new inventory, price changes, description changes, etc).



What you CAN do all depends upon FIRST, what software you are running in your warehouse, SECOND, what you NEED to sync, and THIRD, what you can afford to do.



If your warehouse is running on MS Great Plains, or Epicor software, or some other Enterprise software, you can do most of what you want to do right in SQL server and schedule tasks. But I've seen entire businesses run on MS Access.

What software is the warehouse using to manage inventory?

At the moment we are doing everything manually, that is why I asked :)) what software would you recommend that would be easy to sync with cs-cart straight away? thanks for your answer by the way.

Most of what I know is Accounting and Inventory Management software combined. I’ve used both of the Enterprise version I mentioned above, they are in the thousands of dollars range + dedicated hardware. 3 years ago I had a package written that synced CS-Cart data with a MS RMS server, which was the headquarters server for a chain of retail stores. The package updated and inserted product data and inventory quantities into CS-Cart (hourly), downloaded the orders and updated the shipment of the orders (daily).



I don’t think there are any mods for sale that sync CS-Cart to any back end inventory management software. There has been some custom work done from what I read on this board, and CS-Cart has an API in beta that will be a benefit for this task.



There is something that has half the job done - which has been included with CS-Cart since v1: the Quickbooks Export addon. That’s what I use to manage my inventory (Quickbooks Manufacturing and Wholesale Edition), but I’m only exporting orders and customers into QB, I don’t export the Inventory values out of QB and update the CS-Cart store with it, although that can be done. I manage that manually, since most (but not all) of my sales are from the CS-Cart store anyway.

If you decide to go with Quickbooks (they do offer a multi-user edition with 5 installs all using the same data), I can give you what I have for “QB inventory import from CS-Cart” and “QB order imports from CS-Cart” - the QB export format file (called an IIF file) that comes with CS-Cart is not complete and needs to be customized for each user - but it ain’t difficult - kind of like how their default email message need to be rewritten in real human words too.



Also, no matter what software you go with, since it will be some flavor of accounting/inventory management software, you should talk to an accountant (who does your taxes?) about setting up the Chart of Accounts and your General Ledger, BEFORE you import anything. :)

I assume that the upcoming API will make this much more easy to do.

Which ERP program to use is indeed highly dependent upon your other needs.