Wanted recomendation - Software to manage ........

[UncleSteve]

Newbie questions - be nice to me

I\'m not sure what I\'m looking for, but wish to free up some time by seeing if anyone knows of easier ways or software to use with my business.

Let me run through a few process\'s of how my business runs.

This bit is a separate issue from the accounts side of the business. We receive enquiries via email (currently use Outlook Express) which are generally text only generated via forms on the website. We removed our email address from the site to make people use the forms, as they quite often left out vital information. These enquiries are acted upon and replies sent out via email. At our end each enquiry is hand written out on to enquiry forms to aid tracking in the office. But an easer method of tracking would be nice as we do have lots of enquiries, so occasionally some items get overlooked. I have gone down the route of providing a Q&A page to cover some of the regular questions, and update pages to cover some others, but will continue to have one-off questions.

Now to the money side of my business.
I run an online store where most orders are received via email from paypal (at present - but wish to change later). These orders are manually typed (generally copy and pasted using signature texts to sort of pre-generate the email) in to another email for our supplier to supply the goods and send them direct to our customer (we hardly ever send out orders via fax). Occasionally we receive orders via the phone. We do send out a very limited amount of orders direct to the customer from our stock held at the office.

Most of the orders generated from our website are for items set up on \'add to cart\' buttons, so the order matches our stock list (Excel spread sheet) verbatim. But some are for items which the customer manually types in their requirements and costs, then send that off to paypal. Each stock item has our own unique product code, which is cross-referenced via a single spreadsheet to a supplier, description, OEM product code, supplier code, sale price, purchase price, shipping cost etc. So the above consists of emails in, cross-referenced to spread sheet, back to email.

The customer is also sent an email confirming receipt of their order and likely delivery date.

The supplier sends out the goods to our customer, then sends us an invoice for each delivery, followed up with a monthly statement. These details are manually typed in to another spread sheet together with the cash receipts. A lot of time seems to be spent on this bit of the process to generate reports for payments to suppliers, bank balances etc. At present there is no real connection between the stock sheet and the general accounts sheets. so no day to day checking of suppliers charges against their pre-agreed charges.

Does anyone have any ideas or recommendations to streamline our various process’s and perhaps hopefully integrate them all together.

Thanks for reading this far and any help you can give

Steve


PS I\'m based in the UK and only deal with UK customers

I do something similar without as many emails by the looks of it and I use quickbooks which takes care of my stock control, both held by me and a local company and by a firm that does order fulfilment for us. Its written by Quicken and there support is brilliant.

:whistle:

[Lyndon]

Hi Steve

Welcome to WFHN.

With regards to the email and response handling I would probably go down the helpdesk route. There are absolutely loads of packages that may fit your requirements. The added benefit of some helpdesk packages is that they allow you to delegate certain \"tickets\" or enquires to different departments or people, as well as allowing you to use predefined responses to common questions, tracking your replies, and add transcripts to a FAQ page automatically.

There are several vendors that offer commercial products such as perldesk, kayako, helpdeskpilot* (free for 1 person usage) as well as several free (GPL) solutions - osTicket, Help Centre Live and Support Logic Helpdesk.

For your stock tracking and ordering I would probably consider an eCommerce package or shopping cart. I\'ve only really use one before - osCommerce which is a free (GPL) package which is incredibly powerful and expandable for a free solution.

Regards

Lyndon

personally I would get something written to your requirements. never make your business fit a software solution - make your software fit your business. you would probably be surprised how little this could cost you. checkout places like www.elance.com or www.scripltance.com. if you had a web enabled application made in either php or asp you could have it hosted and access it from anywhere in the world which is great for people who work at home.

[hurgoll]

Originally Posted by oli

personally I would get something written to your requirements. never make your business fit a software solution - make your software fit your business. you would probably be surprised how little this could cost you. checkout places like www.elance.com or www.scripltance.com. if you had a web enabled application made in either php or asp you could have it hosted and access it from anywhere in the world which is great for people who work at home.

Cool, Thanks for the urls, I think I will have some use for them pretty soon.
Have you used either one of them and which one if you had to choose would you say is the best? Or does it just depend on my use? I guess that would make sense.