Adding Value (and Product) to Inventory

The number of SaaS accounting offerings out there is growing by the day already the CloudAve AccountingThread runs to well over a dozen product reviews (as well as a bunch of guest posts and analysis pieces – check it out here).

Despite this impressive showing, and perhaps indicative of the fact that the vendors are focussed on converting those without any current offering rather than flicking desktop software customers, the number of offerings including inventory is very slim.

One of the vendors who, very much to the credit, produces a fully featured stock management system is Saasu. Saasu’s inventory capability is truly ERP grade, extending to assembly/build style inventory and API support. It seems like a minor technicality but, for those with businesses (like mine) that actually deal in physical product, buy raw materials and components, make that raw material up into finished product and sell product by batch lots, this sort of functionality is critical.

Saasu has now added drop shipping to it’s inventory functionality. In their words, what this means is that;

Saasu automatically loads a new purchase with the order information for your default supplier set as the Contact. It also loads the ’ship to’ address you chose in your Sale along with a bunch of other important bits of related transaction information. All you need do is ‘Save and Email’ the purchase as a one step confirmation

Below is a screen shot of the order window – note the user has chosen the "save and drop ship" option;

And here we see the order detail – supplier gets the order with the ship to address already pre-populated – nicely end-to-end;

 
It’s a huge bonus for those playing the intermediary game – selling product that come directly from third party suppliers. It means the business never needs to get its hands dirty with the actual product, stocking hassles or double shipping. It really is huge for product businesses  well done Saasu!