Bison Supply
The formula for success that gave rise to a business that sees astronomical growth each year…
A spare bedroom + a $75 used desk + a computer + determination to deliver superior customer service in the oilfield & industrial supply market
That is how Bart Matthews, President of Bison Supply LLC launched his company. After working in the corporate world for 5 ½ years in the oilfield & industrial supply field and witnessing a lack of customer service he vowed to do better and he did.
I started the company in early 2012. In the first six months of business we broke $100,000 in sales. Each year we’ve grown at an astronomical rate.”
President of Bison Supply Inc
Nothing held Matthews back. With his business initially located in his house, he made the most out of what he had. His office was in a spare bedroom and the garage was his makeshift warehouse.
“We put pallets down in the garage and started buying inventory. We eventually rented a 10 x 10 storage building and used that as an additional warehouse. After three months or so we advanced to a 10 x 40 storage building. We kept that probably two months before finding our first warehouse. We moved into it in the beginning of 2013 and it was $600 a month. It had no A/C and no plumbing.”
In December of 2013, Bison Supply moved into a larger warehouse with office space and a lobby and their growth continued.
That’s about the time we went with Acctivate.”
Bison Supply needed more than just QuickBooks
We started with QuickBooks and we outgrew that real quick. Acctivate is a perfect fit for our business. It does everything that we need it to do.
We felt like we were handicap with QuickBooks only. The good thing about it is we can keep QuickBooks and still use Acctivate and they sync together. Our CPA uses QuickBooks for the accounting portion of the business, but as far as the operating system we use Acctivate.”
Matthews spoke about some of the challenges they faced prior to Acctivate.
Reporting
We couldn’t get the reports out of QuickBooks that we do out of Acctivate — like inventory reports and custom reports. The reporting in Acctivate is way stronger than in QuickBooks. I’m a report oriented person, so that was one of the main reasons I liked Acctivate right off the bat.”
Backorder Management
The other thing QuickBooks didn’t do that Acctivate does was if a customer orders 10 products and we only ship them 8, Acctivate will backorder the other two items. With QuickBooks, we had customers complaining and it was really aggravating on our part trying to figure out what was backordered, what we sent and how many we still owed them. It was just a big hassle.
The beauty of Acctivate is that once you invoice an order, the backordered amount still shows on the order, so if you have partial orders shipped it keeps up with the balance for you. In Acctivate it is so much simpler than basically guessing with QuickBooks and it saves us a ton of time and headaches.”
Mobile
We couldn’t do barcoding with QuickBooks and I wanted to barcode all of my inventory and use a handheld.
Acctivate was the perfect next step for barcoding. We spot check our inventory and do cycle counts at least once a month. Another thing I like about Acctivate is that it allows us to separate products into categories, so we can count by category. We can run a report in Acctivate and do cycle counts on one particular line of products at a time — we don’t have to do our whole warehouse.
We’ll actually scan the barcode for the products and set the inventory on the handheld. It makes it a lot faster than trying to count inventory manually.”
Hosting
Bison Supply uses Acctivate in a hosted environment using Right Networks®. They were already hosting their QuickBooks Enterprise there, as well.
Matthews explained their reasons for hosting both Acctivate and QuickBooks.
We didn’t want to have to store data ourselves or take chances with equipment issues, so it’s all offsite. If we have issues we call Right Networks. It works out great for us.”
From a system they outgrew to a system that will grow with them
Acctivate has definitely saved us time and time is money. Acctivate is also ideal for growing.
Our main goal at some point is to branch out from this one location. Regardless of how many locations we have, Acctivate will allow us to add multiple warehouses and it will tell us the inventory in each warehouse.
In Acctivate, the ability to add modules as needed is convenient and easy. We pay for what we need and if we need to add modules down the road, we can. Acctivate saves us money in that regard.”
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