Product Lookup details the way small and mid-sized multi-channel retailers using QuickBooks® can benefit from having access to a sophisticated product lookup tool.
How well product information is managed and how quickly product lookup can be accomplished are critical components in the success of product-selling businesses. When a customer or vendor calls for information on products, it should take seconds, not minutes, to handle a product lookup and pull up what is being requested. For many businesses still operating with manual or disjointed systems, the time it takes to determine the availability, characteristics, etc. of a certain product can mean the loss of a sale or even a partner. The inability to find product information quickly affects the productivity and costs for the business and for the person waiting.
According to CMS Wire, workers on average spend 36% of their day looking for and consolidating information, but 44% of the time can’t uncover the information they need, leading to wasted productivity. That is a lot of unnecessary time spent just trying to find correct data.
The profitability of a business relies heavily on maximized productivity and affordable costs — gathering product information should not be an issue preventing higher profit margins. Loss of productivity due to searching for information can be replaced with a centralized solution to house all of an organization’s data, making product lookup simple, quick, and flexible.
Acctivate Inventory Software houses all of a business’ data in one central location, eliminating the need to operate on multiple systems, and provides a powerful, multi-faceted product lookup tool designed to drastically reduce time spent searching for product information.
Product Lookup by Location & Availability
When needing to know if a product is on hand, a quick way to see how much and where the product is located is by filtering for product location and availability in Acctivate. When the product is entered into the search, it will filter and list out locations and available inventory of said product at each location. Product lookup by location and availability eliminates the need to have to pick up the phone and contact warehouse staff for confirmation, making a turn-around for the customer quick, accurate and efficient.
Product Lookup by Characteristics
When searching for a product in Acctivate, a user can use a number of product characteristics to quickly pull up product information. Characteristics in Acctivate include product class, product type, product keywords, and by alternate descriptions, which exist to bring further clarity to a product beyond the general description.
For example, a food distributor’s product classes could be listed as dairy, beef, produce, and fish. The user is looking to see if they have plenty of strawberry yogurt on hand. The user can search for dairy (the class), by yogurt (a type), by a specific keyword (strawberry), or by alternate descriptions such as the size of the container or specific characteristics (fresh yogurt with chunks of strawberry). The ability to search and filter by different characteristics allows a user to find the product in question in seconds as long as they know one of many characteristics related to the product. Product lookup by characteristics is straightforward, flexible, and fast.
Examples of Alternate Product Descriptions:
- Alternate languages (English, Spanish, Chinese, Russian, and more)
- Customer type (commercial, government)
- Department needs (sales, purchasing)
- Usage (marketing, engineering)
- Description length (brief and extended, more detailed description)
Product Lookup by Alternate Product IDs
With Acctivate, products can have multiple alternate ID codes, which is perfect for multi-channel retailers. The same product can be searched by any of the alternate ID codes it has attached to it. Often times, a product sold via EDI will likely have internal codes provided by the trading partner that differ from the original but can still be used to search and track by. The use of alternate ID codes is also important for eCommerce — if a product is posted on multiple sites, the same product may carry its own code per site.
Examples of Alternate Product IDs:
- UPC/GDSN
- Vendor Part Numbers
- Customer Specific Part Numbers
- SKU
- Internal Product Numbers
- Manufacturers’ Part Numbers
- Industry-Specific Codes (ex. NRF, NAPA)
Acctivate’s alternate IDs can be used as an alternate lookup key or can be printed on sales/purchase documents. Product lookup by alternate product IDs allows a user to quickly find the product in question based on whatever alternate ID code they are given as long as it is associated with the key product.
For example, when an EDI trading partner like Walmart calls questioning about a product and provides the special ID code they use for the product, a user can just type it in and pull up all product information in seconds instead of scrambling to figure out what code belongs to what product. Product lookup by alternate ID codes further enhances the flexibility and efficiency a user has when searching for product information.
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Learn how Acctivate’s inventory management tools can transform your entire business. Try Acctivate for free or call us at 817-870-1311.