Built For
Hawaii Nut and Bolt
Hawaii Nut and Bolt, Inc. has benefited from an unrivaled level of organization in business management and inventory control since implementing Acctivate.
Hawaii Nut and Bolt distributes building materials such as fasteners, nails & staples, drills & taps, saw blades, other hardware, tools and more throughout the Pacific Rim.
“What makes our company unique is our diverse inventory. We’re on an island surrounded by 2,500 miles of ocean on all sides so because of that, we tend to carry a lot of uncommon stuff – odd sizes and materials that are not used very often,” said owner and CEO Bill Hayes.
However, Hawaii Nut & Bolt is continually growing and updating their inventory.
“Our product lines are constantly evolving and when we bring in new products, sometimes old products leave and sometimes they don’t leave. We’re constantly adding new products and we’ve gone from a single location to two locations.”
A growing company meant it was time for a powerful solution – Acctivate
After growing gradually for more than two decades, Hawaii Nut and Bolt is at last uninhibited by the constraints of an ineffective inventory management system that began to hinder growth.
When Hayes bought the company from his father, making Hawaii Nut & Bolt a three-generation company, he decided the pairing of QuickBooks and Acctivate was the perfect solution to run the business.
When we started the company we were using a manual part-exchange system. We stayed that way until the time when I purchased the company. When I purchased the company, we went to QuickBooks and then we went to Acctivate when we got multiple warehouses.”
Hayes explained his criteria when looking for an inventory management solution…
We wanted something that accurately tracked inventory and had a function that let us know when we needed to re-buy product. We wanted it to be straightforward and do what we needed it to do. Basically, we didn’t want to worry about it – we wanted it to do its job and for it to let us do our job.”
Hawaii Nut & Bolt has up to ten users handling transactions at any given time. They needed a solution that could handle their counter sales, among other sales channels – all with real-time information.
“Counter sales are part of our business. We needed to be able to enter in customer orders whether they came in over the counter or over the phone. We needed to be able to enter it in as a customer was telling us what they wanted.”
And with many parts in inventory, Hayes was also looking for a solution that would offer the pricing flexibility and functions that the business needed.
I wanted more pricing options and more price levels than I was able to find in QuickBooks. Now they’re pretty much unlimited – we’ve got custom pricing options and product pricing options with Acctivate.
I looked at a bunch of solutions and I whittled it down to Acctivate. One of the deciding factors was the flexibility with the various price levels because we’ll sell one particular product and we could sell one of them or we could sell a hundred thousand of them. And we could sell one from a broken box or we could sell one hundred thousand of them from a truckload so pricing levels obviously vary considerably as far as our costs go. So we needed a lot of price levels.”
Unconstrained business operations with Acctivate
Hawaii Nut and Bolt has cultivated Acctivate to measure their expansive inventory. The company distributes millions of small nuts and bolts that consist of diverse sizes, threads, and types.
Pricing
With Acctivate we’ve been able to have pricing be available at the time of order. If you click on the price code, all of the different price levels are visible right away to our sales people. They can talk to a customer and let them know about possible price breaks and quantity discounts instead of having to go flip through a spreadsheet or printed out pages – it’s right there on the screen on the product line in a quote or sales order.”
Hayes explained the various pricing levels the company is able to employ with Acctivate…
The price levels are unlimited and they vary from product to product depending upon variables such as box quantity, bulk box quantity, and pallet quantity.
We set price levels for each variable. The industry is volume driven and it’s no different than if you buy a single can of soda – the per unit price is different than if you buy a 6-pack or a 12-pack or a case. With Acctivate, we can sell at all of those end-user quantity levels.”
Purchasing
Knowing what items need to be reordered is simple – we can find that quickly through Business Alerts in Acctivate. We can generate a purchase order right from there – the reorder function is pretty cool.”
Custom Reports
We’ve taken standard reports and tweaked them to suit our needs. I use Crystal Reports® to modify the Acctivate presets and customize them. I modify the existing quotes, sales order, purchase order forms, and different inventory reports.
The most common type of report we’ll create for specific needs would be various product reports to check for certain items in the warehouse and to manage certain areas of the warehouse.”
Serial Number Control
We use serial number control for our tools. Different tools have a different serial number. We have to have a way to track which tool went to which customer and Acctivate gets the job done for us.
Most everybody in the tool industry has to track which serial numbers were sold and another benefit to that is whenever there’s a recall for a certain range of tools, it’s really quick and easy to identify who bought what tools and contact your customers.”
Hayes continued…
We’ve never had a recall but that was one of the hopes when setting up Acctivate’s Serial Number Control feature – that we would be able to quickly identify which customer bought which tools and contact them right away. It’s just a responsible thing to do to track what tools went to so-and-so customer and having the serial number control functionality makes that possible.”
Acctivate delivers every time
Acctivate has delivered time and time again. The software allows us to have the ability to focus on our customers instead of our inventory, and its point of sale function has transformed the way we complete counter sales.”
Hayes further stated that Acctivate is a cost-effective system that has…
saved us a pile of money.”
For Hawaii Nut and Bolt, inventory problems and headaches have dissipated and become a thing of the past. Although Acctivate is essential to the success of their company, Hayes stated,
I very rarely think about Acctivate because it does everything that it is supposed to do.”
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