Inventory tracking, Invoicing, Purchase order creations, with multiple users?

[SamJ]

Dizzle,

Although price may be an influential factor, it might cost you even more if you were to create your own php/MySQL. Having an advance system to track all your inventory is crucial especially when dealing with multiple users/warehourses. It can be quite complex. I would recommend using a system that already exists. I know Mailware, a multi-channel manager, has inventory management which can help you manage all three warehouses, can handle more information than quickbooks, and can be installed locally. They do provide a free demo on their website so I would go and check that out if you can.

[dizzle]

Sam,

Thanks for the tip. The reason I went into thinking of creating a mysql/php setup was because i know that either I could do it own my own, or I could pay one of my software dev buddies a case of beer and a hot girl and they'd build me whatever I needed. The cost of it wouldn't be too expensive, so that's why I visited that idea (once).

I ended up going with a program called Advanceware Pro. They had a special going on for the month of September that if you bought one of there packages (software + all the modules = $1800) that you'd also get an additional user license at no cost ($500 normally). I hopped at the opportunity because from what I had read about the program, it looked like it would do everything that I needed to do, PLUS more. I downloaded the free trial from our account rep at the company and started fiddling with it a little bit and saw that it was going to everything I needed to do. I went ahead and purchased it also knowing that i'd have a 30day money back guarantee and start to dive into it a bit more.

Unfortunately, I just got off the phone with my account rep about 10 minutes ago because I cancelled our purchase and won't be moving forward with that software. Why? I'll tell you why!

1) it was wayyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy too much software for my company. We have a 3 (sometimes 4) person staff running our business. We have 1 main warehouse that we pull product from (the one attached to our office) and I process all the orders myself. This program was meant for companies running 3+ warehouses where product is constantly being pulled from, with a team of 5+ guys just running the warehouse department. It allowed for networking capabilities between multiple locations and allowed for one person to process an order and for another to pick, pack, and ship the other in a different location.

2) The customization options were ****! They gave you 2 options for invoices/packing slips/order forms and they were hideous. Being a designer and a perfectionist, I wanted to make sure that our invoices looked neat and professional, but vibrant like the invoices/orderforms/packingslips that we'd been using for the past year. The software did give you the option to edit an html template (once you spent 15 minutes tracking the file down) but it was too cumbersome to try and make it look like what I wanted it to look and go one with my daily operations of my company.

SO, if those 2 complaints of mine don't affect you, i would HIGHLY recommend this software for anybody that fits the bill. I had great support from my account rep and I had a great time playing with it, but what it boils down to is that it was literally too much software for my company.

I've been playing with inflow inventory (refer to new thread I posted) and so far so good. I'll post an update on that later on.