QuickBooks® Inventory
Control and Business
Management Software

FOCUS Bikes, an international name in the world of sport bicycles, based in Germany has been around since 1992. Their success prompted the establishment of offices in the United States and Italy in 2009.

The United States office in Carlsbad, California handles the distribution and to be successful with this operation they needed an inventory and distribution management system.

They searched for an inventory control solution that would integrate with their existing financial and accounting system, QuickBooks® Premier, as well as extend it's functionality to handle things like multiple locations, assemblies and shipping. In their search they came across a few very high ticket enterprise solutions, but none of these were appropriate for their company size.

"Luckily the advisor that we had on setting up our entire operations system found ACCTivate! and it filled its role perfectly," Jeff Rowe, Operations Manager said.

Overall, Rowe finds ACCTivate! to be an effective system for inventory management, purchasing, warehousing and sales orders. At their office they have five employees that use ACCTivate! on a daily basis.

"When sales or our customer service personnel are looking at open sales orders or they're looking at issues, they're always using ACCTivate!," Rowe said.

Although their manufacturing is done in Germany, the California location does do some assembly and for this they use ACCTivate!. In ACCTivate! they setup all of the parts — the parent item and the components and in turn they assemble about eight bicycles a day, which they schedule to meet open sales orders.

With ACCTivate!, FOCUS processes about ten sales orders per day normally. When they have a freight container come into the country, which is around every month, they process about 40 orders per day.

Rowe also says ACCTivate! is user friendly. "I'm about to train a new employee on it and it's a guy that I've worked with for many years. I trained him on point of sales systems in the past that were very difficult to deal with. I know it will go smoother even than a retail point of sale system," Rowe said.

Beyond the functionality of ACCTivate!, Rowe has had a positive experience with the customer service and support.

"Generally when anything goes wrong I can get one of the two or three people that I've been familiar with there to log right into my computer and fix it or explain it to me very quickly. That's been invaluable to us," Rowe said.

As a new office, the FOCUS Bikes location in Carlsbad needed business solutions to begin their business and manage operations. They chose QuickBooks to manage their financials and integrated it with ACCTivate! to manage their inventory and distribution. Overall they have found this combination to be effective for their operations.

For more information about FOCUS Bikes read their Customer Spotlight.