OrderTrac vs Traditional Inventory Software

OrderTrac was built specifically for Amish Furniture Stores. Amish furniture has slight differences from traditional furniture manufactures, leading to a need for software that tracks inventory differently.

How is OrderTrac different from any other generic inventory software, like Quickbooks POS? Read on to find out.

100s of Vendors to Track

First of all, Amish furniture does not come from a single manufacturer. Furthermore, you have have multiple vendors involved in the production of a piece of furniture, such as the Manufacturer, Finish shop, and transport company. These vendors can vary from item to item. It is common for a retailer to work with hundreds of manufactures and even a variety of finish shops and transport companies.

Contrast that to most traditional furniture retailers who may only work with a small handful of Manufacturers or distributers. In fact, a store may only work with a primary distributer where they orders most of their products. This simplifies the order process since you can order everything in 1 spot.

Amish stores have a much larger task of tracking all the vendors they work with. They must track all the vendors involved in every item they order, as well as the cost that vendor charged in order to accurately track cost of goods sold. Cost can vary from item to item due to the variety of customizations that are possible with each item, such as wood species, stain colors, hardware, fabrics, and many other options not to mention customizations to the original design or size.

OrderTrac allows you to track every vendor for every item, and the cost for every vendor so you know exactly how much every item cost you. Plus, if a customer were to return a year later to add more chairs to their set, you can quickly look up their order to see who built the chair, who finished the chair, what stain was used, and even the cost.

Winner: OrderTrac!

Sheer number of product variety & customizations

The next major difference is the catalog. Most traditional furniture retailers offer most products with just a few options, if any. What you see is what you get for the most part, you can't customize the hardware or color. The product has 1 ID and it is either in stock or it isn't. Most inventory systems can handle this because you just enter the entire catalog and then track how many of each you have in stock.

Amish furniture does not work like that. Lets say a certain manufacturer has a table style in their catalog that the customer likes. Now that the model has been selected, the customer can choose from many different wood species, like brown maple, hickory, white oak, quarter sawn white oak, and cherry. Once they select a wood they like, now they have to pick the color from over 40 stain colors. Do they want the finish to be smooth or distressed? Semi-gloss or Matte sheen? Also what size should the table be: 42x60, 42x66, 42x72, 48x60, etc. Do they want it to have a solid top or leaf extensions? How many extensions? How about the table height: 30" or 36"? And for the edge profile, do they want the rounded edge, mission edge, ore eased edge?

As you can see, that is a LOT of option to price. Now multiply that by hundreds of vendors, and multiply that by the number of items each vendor offers! That is too many to count! Do you want to enter every single one of these combinations into your system and price each combo, not knowing if you are going to sell it in the future?

That is where OrderTrac separates from traditional inventory tracking software, like QuickBooks. Most inventory systems need to you enter your catalog of items into the system BEFORE you can every sell it. Because when the customer is ready to purchase, you need to be able to ring up the item that is already in the system.

With OrderTrac however, you do NOT have to pre-enter every item. You only enter items when either (1) The customer places an order, or (2) When you order the item for your own inventory.

This means with OrderTrac, you do NOT spend hundreds of hours pricing and entering your entire catalog into your inventory software. When the customer walks into your showroom and picks our the perfect piece from the catalog, only then do you enter that item into OrderTrac. You simply create a new purchase order, and enter the details of the item the customer wants to order (vendor, options, wood species, etc), and enter the price. Here it is in action:

Once saved, OrderTrac is now going to track that item all throughout the order process. The item will immediately show how the "To be ordered" list. A manager can keep an eye on this list and generate purchase orders as needed to send the purchase order. Once the purchase order is generated, the item is automatically set to On Order. The estimated arrival date is automatically set based on the lead time for that vendor.

Winner: OrderTrac!

In conclusion

Based on the differences between traditional furniture and Amish furniture outlined above, you can see how the software you use on a daily basis to manage all of your sales and inventory needs to be a software that was built specifically for the ordering process you deal with every day.

Don't do it the hard way and try to make some generic off the shelf inventory tracking software, let OrderTrac streamline your day to day operations!