The QuickBooks Bottleneck

"Before Quicklet, there was only one sales operation person who had access to QuickBooks Desktop, which meant that every order that came in had to funnel through that one person. This person was the only person who could enter in orders, check on orders, search for past orders - in other words, a bottleneck." says Kenneth Corelli, Optilab sales and operations manager. "Sometimes, it would take several hours just to process one invoice."

In the beginning, Optilab had a single person who was responsible for creating, reviewing and processing invoices. The sales team would funnel all sales orders to this individual who would then enter in the data into QuickBooks Desktop. This worked initially; an invoice could usually get processed in about 30 minutes. But Optilab was growing, often taking in over 10 invoices a day. This sales processing employee, overwhelmed with requests from multiple people, was now becoming a bottleneck - juggling invoice entry, searching historical invoice information, updating invoices, verifying them for fulfillment and shipment. Amidst this growth, invoice processing could take 24 hours if business was particularly busy.

THE SEARCH FOR SOLUTIONS

The team looked at a variety of cloud services and lower-end ERP solutions but they were either unsatisfied with the lack of functionality (cloud services) or shocked by the implementation cost and time (ERP solutions). In the end, Optilab selected Quicklet because it fulfilled the key requirements for this small but rapidly growing company:

• securely opened up QuickBooks invoice information and functionality to a larger set of Optilab employees
• allowed employees to access the data from any laptop or mobile phone
• was quick and easy to implement 
• was inexpensive (no consulting, configuration or maintenance costs)
• kept its accounting and historical data inside QuickBooks

The result...  TEAM EFFORT + FASTER INVOICE PROCESSING

Since installing Quicklet, the entire sales and operations team can now create and process invoices on their own from any device; invoice processing time has been reduced to just 10 minutes. Sales people can also now pull up historical invoices as they interact with their customers in the office or on the road. Fulfillment and shipping folks can check on invoice payment and shipping dates. No more bottlenecks.

"Quicklet has made daily invoicing and customer tasks less of a chore and has shifted responsibility to the entire team for order inquiries, fulfillment, invoice creation and payment. We are able to respond faster to customers. Processing orders is now a team-based effort," says Ken Corelli.