Overall Acctivate has saved us eight hours a day — a whole workday.”
Paul, General Manager, FPC Security
Online retailer, FPC Security delivers high-quality access control equipment to the “do-it-yourself” (DIY) market. Their vast inventory of electronic security products, including maglocks, key pads, and proximity card readers are sold on Amazon and eBay and their Volusion powered web store.
Since their start in 2010, FPC Security has steadily grown — getting closer to achieving their goal of becoming a one-stop shop for all electronic security equipment needs.
FPC Security keeps businesses and homes secure across the U.S. with their products, but how do they protect their own business investment?
General manager, Paul gave us a one-on-one account of how FPC Security’s ecommerce operations became 24 times more efficient and how they gained an entire workday of productivity overall.
Q: What challenges were slowing down your ecommerce operations?
“We had a big problem. Invoicing was done manually and taking a lot of time out of the day. The person invoicing would get the order from Amazon, pull in the customer’s information, the price, the product, the whole spiel.
We wanted to find the best way to integrate everything and make our web order process more automated.
We found a business that integrated our web stores with QuickBooks.”
Q: Did your management of web store orders improve with QuickBooks?
“No. We moved our inventory process and everything to QuickBooks. The inventory module and web store integration with QuickBooks didn’t work well for us at all.”
Managing inventory solely with QuickBooks proved to be inefficient and complex for FPC Protection. QuickBooks lacks advanced inventory capabilities, such as multiple ID codes for each product, alternative inventory product descriptions, and flexible costing. FPC Protection also found the process of managing kits (which are the majority of their products) in QuickBooks to be tedious.
On top of the QuickBooks inventory module not satisfying specific business needs, web store integration in QuickBooks still involved manual steps that were slowing down FPC Protection’s operations. QuickBooks did not have a way to easily synchronize their orders, tracking information and product availability bi-directionally with Volusion, Amazon and eBay. But FPC Protection found out that Acctivate did and the process has since become automated and has completely transformed the crucial component of their operational success — their web store.
Q: How did your processes improve once you integrated QuickBooks and your web stores with Acctivate?
When we moved to Acctivate it was an immediate change of productivity and also saving money.
The minute that we integrated our web stores in Acctivate, we went from spending six hours invoicing to 30 minutes. Then Acctivate’s Sales Order Manager for bulk invoicing and picking reduced those 30 minutes to 15 minutes.
With Acctivate, we can focus on running our company, instead of doing unnecessary data entry. We are also now up to par with the qualifications that Amazon requires from us.”
Acctivate has a configurable template for web stores, which has enabled FPC Protection to specify the information to send back to Amazon and update the web orders automatically based on Amazon’s requirements. For instance, the Amazon Merchant ID, Seller ID and Marketplace ID can be sent with the web orders.
FPC Protection also manages their Amazon fulfillment as a virtual warehouse within Acctivate, separate from their physical warehouse, which enables them to accurately and efficiently track their inventory in real-time for each web store/marketplace.
Q: What overall benefits do you see with Acctivate?
Acctivate completely changed our business. We have such a great system now.
The warehouse can get and ship the orders faster, which means better customer service because the customers are receiving their product on time.
Acctivate didn’t just help the manual invoice process, it helped the overall productivity of the company.”
Q: How much time has Acctivate saved the company overall?
Overall Acctivate has saved us eight hours a day — a whole workday.”
Q: On the FPC Security web store various access control kits for specific businesses and projects are sold.
How does Acctivate help you with selling and managing your kit products?
“We sell a lot of kits, so kitting is very important for our business.”
The way the kitting process is facilitated in Acctivate is transparent and a no-brainer.
In Acctivate we also use a sales report that tells us which kit was sold, what the margin was, and what the price was. It’s like our bible.”
Q: How has your experience been with the Acctivate team?
I’m very happy with the service and support we have received from the Acctivate team.
The developers really have the customer in mind and put themselves in the shoes of different customers because each business is completely different. They think about every type of scenario.
I feel that FPC Security is more proactive because of the move that we did with Acctivate.”