QuickBooks® Inventory
Control and Business
Management Software

Matthew 25: Ministries, a federally recognized 501(c)(3) not-for-profit disaster aid and humanitarian relief organization, tracks thousands of donated goods in their 132,000 square foot warehouse with ACCTivate! Inventory and Distribution Management software.

"The goods are typically donated by corporations that have overstocked inventory that is either slightly damaged, out of style, the wrong color, wrong sizes and just for whatever reason its not saleable from their standpoint," Don Olson, Chief Financial Officer said.

All the items are evaluated to ensure that they are appropriate for their intended destination, whether it be third world countries or areas in the United States hit by natural disaster. Volunteers help to categorize, sort, process and package the products for shipment.

"We have to really keep track — good track of these items that are sitting in our warehouse, so ACCTivate! has been excellent at helping us keep control of that inventory," Olson said.

Items are donated to Matthew 25 and they ship the donated goods to partner organizations in the recipient locations that make the final distribution to the people in need. So, Matthew 25 doesn't sell items, but they do utilize the functionality of ACCTivate!'s Sales Order Management solution to manage their inventory.

Matthew 25 tracks the pallets of goods they ship, rather than individual goods. They ship 40 foot ocean going containers that hold up to 36 pallets of goods. When a recipient location needs goods, the partner organization in that location requests the needed items and Matthew 25 customizes the containers for them.

"That container becomes a sales order. So, on that sales order (container) we put 36 pallets of goods on it and it's ACCTivate! that we're using to track all those pallets of goods going in and out of our warehouse," Olson said.

ACCTivate! includes over 100 standard reports and its integration with Crystal Reports® allows for virtually any document to be created.

Olson has taken the three custom reporting training classes offered by ACCTivate! and now creates the custom reports he needs using Crystal Reports.

"I'm pretty good at finding a standard ACCTivate! report that comes pretty close to what I need, get in there and play around with it and tweak it," Olson said.

By the beginning of 2010, Matthew 25 plans to start processing food with the development of their Food Processing Center. Matthew 25 received a grant for a piece of equipment that will allow them to mix soy, rice and a flavoring into one pound bags, seal and ship it.

They have donors that donate food, but since food is the number one need throughout they are asked to meet, they want to increase the quantity of food they can provide by producing their own.

This new project requires them to lot track the food to comply with FDA regulations, so they will use ACCTivate!'s Lot Number Control add-on module.

Prior to ACCTivate!, Matthew 25 was using an Microsoft Access® database that Olson had created from scratch to track their inventory and it worked pretty good, but they have found that ACCTivate! has robust functionality that they didn't have with the homegrown database.

"I didn't have lot tracking. I don't know how I would have done it. I would have figured out how to do it in Access, but it would have been painful, where it comes off the shelf with ACCTivate!," Olson said. "ACCTivate! has so much more functionality than I had previously and ACCTivate! is very bulletproof."

The Access database was more susceptible to human error. Minor errors could suddenly affect the entire system, in which they could be down for some time and Olson would have to spend a significant amount of time trying to resolve the issues.

"So the editing capabilities that ACCTivate! provides really helps us to make sure that the data that's getting loaded is cleaner," Olson said.

In the search for an inventory management solution, Olson chose ACCTivate! for its integration with QuickBooks® and track record that spans over two decades.

Olson found ACCTivate! on the Intuit Solutions Marketplace, which lists third party software applications compatible with QuickBooks. Olson also read several customer testimonials he found by searching the internet.

"You can find some testimonials and they spoke very highly of ACCTivate! and particularly the longevity," Olson said. "I wanted something that had a proven track record. The competition all seemed to just not have the track record of ACCTivate!. That's really what swayed me to ACCTivate!."

Matthew 25 has used ACCTivate! since 2008 to manage and control their inventory.

"I'm excited I'm on ACCTivate!. I envision us using it for a long time to come," Olson said.

For more information on Matthew 25: Ministries read their Customer Spotlight.