Automation SE (ASE) manufactures custom filling machinery. Each piece is carefully constructed to fit the exact needs of the project it’s intended for; however, ASE found themselves struggling with one-size-fits-all accounting software.
After years of fumbling in the dark when it came to their finances, ASE switched from QuickBooks to aACE – and the results have been illuminating.
Challenges and aACE Solutions
Inventory Guessing Games
QuickBooks isn’t built to handle large-scale inventory demands, so workarounds became commonplace for ASE. Unfortunately this meant that they couldn’t rely on their accounting solution to give them a complete picture of their business operations. The more they worked outside the software, the less they could trust the information within it.
“The way our QuickBooks functioned was completely separate from any reality of the business,” says Katherine Kunze of ASE. “It wasn’t even a good financial record until the end of the year, because our inventory wasn’t connected to the software in any way and we weren’t doing counts throughout the year.”
“Essentially,” she explains, “Everything we bought went straight into the Cost of Goods Sold account. Then at the end of the year we’d do one journal entry to move everything out of COGS and into inventory. That was the closest we could get to knowing what our bottom line was.”
“aACE is great because it’s actually connected to real data, so we have a more accurate understanding of where we are in each moment,” Katherine adds.
Spread-Out Spreadsheets
It wasn’t just inventory that became a headache in QuickBooks. Even core accounting functions – which should have been the software’s bread and butter – were needlessly complicated by the need to keep up with multiple solutions. “We weren’t using any of the QuickBooks features for, say, creating invoices,” Katherine explains. That’s because QuickBooks didn’t track what parts or quantities had actually been shipped versus what had been ordered, so it was easier to create invoices manually outside the system. aACE changed that. “Now it’s great, because our sales orders exist in aACE and the invoices auto-populate based on what’s actually been shipped. It’s actually connected to the reality of what we’re doing.”
Their purchasing workflows have undergone a similar transformation since implementing aACE. “In our previous system, if I wanted to go and see what we had purchased in the past, all of our POs were in Excel documents. So if I needed a historical price on something, I would have to go and manually search the documents. The data just wasn’t integrated with our actual business,” Katherine says. This was a frequent occurrence, adding up to hours of wasted time. Fortunately, aACE makes it easy to track all of that information in a single, unified solution. “Now when I’m ordering something from a vendor we normally buy from, I can just duplicate the last PO. For our standard procurement items, it’s so much faster and better. It just naturally pulls up the pricing from the last time I ordered.”
Results
Integrated Production Workflows
Of course, the biggest game-changer for any manufacturing company is an integrated production workflow. aACE was a major upgrade from QuickBooks there as well. “The bill of materials is really helpful,” Katherine explains. “Again, it actually connects our accounting to what’s happening in the business.” This seamless integration means that the ASE team no longer needs to go hunting for data – it’s all right at their fingertips. “If I can’t remember what’s in the bill of materials for something, I can just use the bill of materials search function in aACE. It saves so much time.”
aACE has also made it easier to track the many moving parts of a manufacturing company – and there are many. “We have so many part numbers that I think our line item codes are in the tens of thousands at this point,” Katherine says, adding that she was shocked at how well aACE handles that load. “I’ve worked in databases before with CRM, but I hadn’t worked in databases before in this context,” she explains. “And I was really worried in the beginning about standardizing all of our part numbers, because I thought that I was going to have to do a lot of exporting from the ERP and then doing my own calculations outside of it. So I was trying to standardize things in a very specific way so that I could parse the data myself later on.”
“That turned out to be unnecessary because of the way aACE is built out,” she continues. “Even if I need to change a part number, I can do it in the item record and aACE changes it everywhere else automatically. Even if I had tried to build out some inventory in QuickBooks to have some kind of actual relationship to our manufacturing processes, I doubt that I could trust that kind of database the same way.”
Constructive Data Entry
And not only does ASE’s aACE solution record more data than QuickBooks did – it also puts that information to better use, making data entry feel less like a chore. “We didn’t have data like pricing in QuickBooks because there wasn’t really a good place to keep it,” Katherine says. “So all of our purchasing and all of our sales were essentially reduced to the overall numbers. Anything that needed to hit a specific GL account had to be entered separately.
“But there was no connection between particular parts we bought and a corresponding line item code, because we have so many things that we buy and sell that entering that data into QuickBooks just wouldn’t have made sense,” she continues. “With aACE, it makes sense to put all that data in because it actually connects to the task groups and the bill of materials and all that. If we had put that in QuickBooks alone, it just would have ended up being a lot of busywork with no high-value result.”
Setting up all of ASE’s item codes in aACE may have seemed a little daunting in the beginning, but Katherine says that the endeavor has paid dividends in terms of their ability to keep reliable records. “All the time and energy that I’ve spent building out the line item codes in aACE is something I never would have done in QuickBooks, because QuickBooks doesn’t have the functionality you need” to do anything with that data, she says. “So we just didn’t bother.”
“That meant that any time we bought something, it basically just got coded as one line item code, which was parts,” Katherine continues. “Then that went into the Cost of Goods Sold account. So you had a really inaccurate picture of what was happening in the business, but it just didn’t make sense to build everything out. Sure, you’d have that one item in your system for the next time you buy it, but then you’ve done all that data input and still wouldn’t be able to move it through your business because the software didn’t have the right production tools.” Now that ASE is on aACE, data entry is worth doing – and worth doing right.
If you’re considering a similar transition, we invite you to schedule an introductory call with our team or learn more through our independent third-party comparison report.
