Tunze USA is dedicated to providing its customers with innovative, energy-efficient solutions for regulating the environment in their aquariums. But back in 2009, they found that their technological environment wasn’t keeping pace with their business. That’s when they upgraded from QuickBooks to aACE – and they’ve been getting along swimmingly ever since.
Challenges & aACE Solutions
Software Without Building Blocks
Tunze USA is the American branch of a company based in Germany, where their products are now manufactured. But back in 2009 they were fabricating pump parts here in the U.S. – and QuickBooks couldn’t keep up. “We were kind of stuck when we outgrew QuickBooks,” recalls Roger Vitko, Managing Member at Tunze USA. “QuickBooks couldn’t do builds. At the time we were actually producing some products here, and we needed a build feature to do assemblies. We needed software that could take parts, deduct them from inventory, and produce a product.”
Since QuickBooks didn’t offer those features, Roger began searching for a solution that did. “At the time I had an employee who had worked for a much bigger company, and he was familiar with FileMaker. He said that that’s what we needed, so we bought it and quickly realized we didn’t have the first clue as to how to make it work.”
Roger and his team turned to local experts, but found their prices were out of line with what Tunze needed at the time. “We called around to different IT and tech support companies in town, and every one of them gave us a price between $20,000 and $40,000 to build out a solution. And the lowball offers were always like, ‘Well, I can do it for $20,000 but it’s gonna have problems. For $40,000 it’ll be perfect.’ So we kept searching. We thought, surely there’s somebody who has already built something on FileMaker that we could just buy.”
That “somebody” was the team at aACE Software. “We found a couple of other FileMaker solutions, but we ruled them out pretty much immediately because they just didn’t have what we were looking for,” says Roger. “We needed something that could replace QuickBooks and do so much more. aACE seemed to be the only ready-to-go solution.” Tunze implemented aACE 3, and now – 17 years and 3 integer versions later – they are still delighted with the results.
Accounting Made for Owner-Operators
QuickBooks is a great tool for owner-operators to see the big picture of their business’ accounting, but as Tunze grew they found it difficult to bring more users in. “The problem with QuickBooks, at least in the beginning, was that you really couldn’t share it,” Roger explains. “It was on your desktop, and if you had multiple employees, they all couldn’t access and work for the same system. I’m sure they’ve modernized that to some degree but at the time it was pretty much impossible for us to run our business the way we do now, even with just a few employees and a remote bookkeeper.”
Although QuickBooks has sunsetted its desktop solution in favor of cloud-based options, it can still lose steam as businesses grow. aACE is designed to scale with midsize businesses, with tools that make it easy to ensure everyone has access to the data they need while keeping sensitive information secure.
Surprise Fees and Hidden Costs
Even though Tunze no longer runs their own business on QuickBooks, many of the companies they do business with are still using it. And they could still pass QuickBooks-related fees onto Tunze.
“I have customers that still use QuickBooks, and they complain about how much it constantly nickel and dimes them,” Roger says. “Like, if you use their payment processing, it costs extra. And I have vendors that use it and to pay by ACH, QuickBooks takes $25, which is ridiculous. So we just bypass it and do the ACH outside of QuickBooks.”
aACE licensing is designed to be fully transparent, so businesses don’t have to worry about being hit with surprise hidden charges.
Results
A Clear View into Inventory
QuickBooks’ basic inventory tracking features don’t cut it for businesses with many moving parts. That’s where aACE comes in. “Managing inventory has been a big improvement” since switching from QuickBooks to aACE, says Roger.
aACE’s inventory replenishment tools have been particularly helpful for Tunze. “The fact that I can set the quantity I want to have and the rebuy level is huge,” he explains, referring to the Target Balance and Replenishment Balance fields found within each inventoried item’s record. These fields allow Roger to set a target number of items to keep in stock and a low balance number which prompts the system to generate a purchase order.
“I’m actually working on that now, because we’ve had a sudden spike in demand that we’ve had to adjust for,” Roger says. “At the same time, we have to account for products that are being phased out and replaced, so we have to manage those order quantities as well. Having the tools to manage those things makes a huge difference.”
Accurate Reporting Made Easy
Roger isn’t the only one happy with Tunze’s aACE implementation. “My accountant really likes how easy it is to get reports,” he says. “That’s really come in handy for other things, too. Like my lawyer will need a specific report, or the bank will, and I can just find what they need.”
The depth of reporting in aACE allows Roger and his team to slice and dice their data however they need, ensuring they can see their business clearly from every angle. “Whether it’s inventory count reports, tax reports – they’re all very useful,” Roger adds. “The degree of reports I can get is a big factor” putting aACE above the competition.
aACE’s built-in audit trails also made the solution a big improvement over QuickBooks. “Back when we were using QuickBooks, if you went back to look over old records it was entirely possible to accidentally write over them. One simple mistake and it was like an invoice or a purchase order never existed. Our accountant told me that QuickBooks was difficult because it didn’t meet any true accounting standards, so if you were audited there wasn’t much to go on unless you printed everything and kept backups and a real paper trail.”
That’s exactly the kind of problem that aACE’s advanced logging and user group features were designed to solve. aACE’s detailed user permissions allow system administrators to decide not only which user groups have access to which records, but how much access each group has. This makes it possible to not only limit who can see particular types of records, but who can edit or delete them as well. It’s also impossible to accidentally edit records in aACE – users have to enter Edit Mode to make most changes. Finally, aACE tracks all important changes made to open records, including who made the change and when. These protections combined make aACE an auditor’s dream.
Time-Saving Integrations
Taking credit card payments used to be a hassle involving manual entry, separate terminals, and the increased opportunity for mistakes. aACE’s payment processing integration changed that once and for all. “In the past when I had to run credit cards, I’d have to take the invoice, log into the bank, and manually type in the credit card numbers,” Roger explains.
Even having a card on file didn’t eliminate the legwork involved in running it: “If I was using the bank system where it was saved, I’d have to manually pull up the customer by their account number. Either way it would more than double the time it took to process credit cards.”
aACE’s shipping integration has also proven to be a huge time-saver. “I used to have to go to the UPS program – and come to think of it, even when we were on aACE version 3 I think I still had to do that,” Roger says, pointing out that aACE, which is now on version 6, has come a long way since Tunze first made the switch nearly two decades ago.
“We had to go to the UPS program and type in the shipment manually, or at best copy and paste it, and then do the reverse to put the tracking number and shipping cost back into our system,” he explains. “It wasn’t automatic, so it made things much slower. Handling shipping labels was practically a full-time job, and it was tedious.”
“Now that we’re on aACE 6, on a busy day we can usually have all the labels knocked out within an hour,” Roger adds. “And a lot of that is checking and double-checking, so we could probably do it faster.
In Their Own Words
Here’s what Roger Vitko has to say about his company’s aACE implementation:
“I’ve been impressed with everybody that works for aACE. I’ve always found that they go above and beyond to make you happy, and they’re very prompt and courteous with their replies. Every now and then I’ve had an urgent issue – the internet goes out or the server isn’t working – and it’s usually something stupid that I’m doing, but if I’m able to send an email I get a response very quickly. They’ll say, ‘Hey, try this’ and get me back online.
“There’s also been a lot of continuity with the team itself, which is something most people don’t really think about. But it’s a huge pain when companies change their employees all the time and you don’t know who does what anymore. It makes a big difference when the person you’re dealing with knows exactly what business you’re with and has all of your information pulled up already.
“From what I’ve seen, aACE can do just about anything. I would recommend it to anybody who’s in a wholesale or distribution business. It has every feature that you need for that sort of work. I could also see someone in professional services, like septic or plumbing, being able to maintain all the pipes and things in inventory and keep track of all the employees who are going out and performing the services with work orders and everything. All of that functionality is there. So I would say anyone in a wholesale or service type of business would benefit from aACE.”
Interested in learning more about what aACE can do for your SMB? Read our Feature Highlights to see how aACE can help you take your operations to the next level.
