QuickBooks® Inventory
Control and Business
Management Software

BioBased Technologies® manages their business operations, including their manufacturing process, inventory, sales, purchasing and customers with ACCTivate! for QuickBooks.

They manufacture Agrol®, which is a soybean based, earth-friendly polyol used to produce their other product brands, BioBased Insulation® and Soy Seal®.

ACCTivate!'s Variable Build / Batch Manufacturing module allows BioBased Technologies to manage the simple manufacturing of their products, which involves chemical manufacturing.

"It's really simple and user-friendly," Tina Miles, BioBased Technologies' Controller said about using the manufacturing module. "We're lot-based, so you go in and do your assemblies, pull your raw materials and it gives you a selection of all the lots and how much is available for you to draw from and it immediately updates all your inventory."

"It's doing the manufacturing so we can get all the costs rolled into the cost per pound or cost per set," Miles said.

In addition to simple manufacturing, they use the base features of ACCTivate! for daily tasks such as receiving, shipping, selling, purchasing and customer relationship management.

Prior to ACCTivate!, BioBased Technologies managed their inventory manually in Microsoft Excel®, used Microsoft Dynamics™ for business management and handled financials in QuickBooks.

After the implementation of ACCTivate!, they were able to continue using QuickBooks, since it is compatible with ACCTivate!, and now see tremendous benefits in the management of their business operations.

"The way we did it before was really inefficient, it was very time consuming and a lot more susceptible to human error," Miles said. "Now I think it is much more streamlined, efficient, and it gives us daily up-to-date inventory counts so that we can better manage our inventory, our inventory levels and our purchasing needs."

They also realize the benefits compared to their previous system. "Microsoft Dynamics was way too complex for us because we are a smaller organization. ACCTivate! fit our needs for our business size and the resources we have," Miles said.

"Compared to some of the things that are out there, ACCTivate! was simple enough to be trained on, to populate the data that we needed and integrate with QuickBooks, so that we could get up and running on limited money and limited people," Miles said. "We don't even have a full-time IT person on staff."

With limited resources including no IT specialists, Miles and the inventory manager did a lot of the configuration and setup and were able to quickly implement ACCTivate!. "We needed something that wasn't so technical," Miles said.

Since ACCTivate!, BioBased Technologies has experienced improved organization, efficiency and productivity. Before, they only updated their inventory once a month, did a physical count and had a final inventory.

"You couldn't really do any kind of analysis," Miles said about their inventory management prior to ACCTivate!. "It was hard to determine your purchasing needs, so ACCTivate! has really benefited us in a number of areas from efficiency to just better inventory planning and purchasing."

"Overall it's just been a tremendous time efficiency and I know that's only going to continue to improve," Miles said. "Even from where we were a year ago to where we are now, it's a complete transformation."

Read their Customer Spotlight for more information about BioBased Technologies.