We recently heard a great story from our partners at Intuit, check it out!
"Leslie Capachietti of Automated Financial Solutions recently completed an install with an e-cigarette company. Here, she talks about her learnings:
EZ Cig Vapors in Wakefield, MA was using electronic cash registers, not tracking inventory and COGS, in addition to having difficulty tracking and remitting sales tax. They were looking for a solution that would allow them to capture customer information and offer a rewards program. Their longer term goals are to start selling online, add at least one more location and, eventually, sell the business as a "turnkey" operation.
We worked with the Revel Systems onboarding team to put the system/hardware together and in place. Next, we got the merchant services and QBO up and running. This all went pretty smoothly.
The complexity of this type of inventory made for some challenges during implementation. Many of the items (e-cig's) that they assemble and resell do not come with UPCs. They also sell the liquid vapors separately which are not shipped with barcodes on them, and one flavor alone can have as many as 8 different strengths. QuickBooks Revel does a nice job of creating labels when you export to Excel and reimport the list with UPCs (however, the bottles are so small and sell so quickly that it is not feasible to print/attach a label). In this case, they use the search function which works pretty well. They are now tracking about 1500 items in Revel.
EZ Cig Vapors now has a standardized process in place for setting up and working with the different e-cig types, including strengths and flavors. Once an item is setup, they love how easy it is to receive into inventory. We're excited with the configuration that we designed (see photos of iPad menu) because we think it can be used/shared as template for similar types of businesses.
In addition to the benefit of now having a true inventory and customer tracking system in place, the client is now on their way to building a valuable "turnkey" business that can be easily scaled (they are looking to open another location in the next 12 - 18 months) and eventually sold."
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