QuickBooks® Inventory
Control and Business
Management Software

Mattingly Sports, sporting goods manufacturer, grew significantly after their establishment in 2005 and they realized managing inventory using spreadsheets and their own reports without any live data wasn't going to be able to handle their growth effectively.

"We had a lot of pieces of scrap paper and Excel worksheets, it was a mess," Chuck Smith, Vice President of Operations and R&D said about their inventory and business management prior to a solution.

Before implementing an inventory control solution, they often ran into issues where information was lost and orders may not have been able to be shipped because they were double booking.

They needed a business management system that integrated with their financial backbone, QuickBooks and chose ACCTivate!.

"After looking at several systems, ACCTivate! had the deepest functionality, most robust number of modules and the best value," Skip Shaw, President and Co-founder said. "In a former life, I was a consultant for Accenture and we helped many companies implement systems, such as Oracle and SAP and I was amazed at the functionality ACCTivate! brought to the table."

ACCTivate! has allowed Mattingly Sports to maintain a small staff and is critical to their management of a "virtual company".

Their employees are located across broad locations, but despite the distance Shaw said they are able to keep everyone on the same page with ACCTivate! being their "operational system of records" for handling orders, customer relationship management, warehousing, shipping, receiving and more.

"ACCTivate! allows us to really be synced up seamlessly with our warehouse, which is located a couple of hours south of me, with our sales folks who are down in Florida, and with our office in Connecticut. We're all able to seamlessly access the same information, the same reports, the same orders and purchasing data simultaneously," Smith said. "We actually have weekly meetings for a couple of different functions where we pull up the same report in real-time in the meeting and review it together."

ACCTivate! has also allowed Mattingly Sports to be more productive, despite the distance between the employees.

"Prior to ACCTivate! we always had to send emails and let each other know that the 'order is in', 'it has to ship out', 'when it has to ship out' and all that, now it's just a matter of going in and seeing what orders are in at certain times during the day and cutting down on communication that was really unnecessary in the past," Joe Smeraglino, Operations Manager, said.

They have also gained productivity across various areas of their business in general, such as with warehousing.

"I'm responsible for all the order fulfillment in managing our warehousing operations, so I'm able to monitor very closely what they're doing and we've put in over time different reports, different process that ACCTivate! allows us to do that saves us significant time on their end," Smith said.

They have also experienced similar productivity gains in purchase management.

"I'm responsible for all the product procurement and purchasing, so I'm able in a much faster way than the way we did it back before ACCTivate! to analyze what we need from the purchasing requirements side and get those POs issued and out to our vendors," Smith said.

Maintaining a small staff helps Mattingly Sports keep their overhead down and attract the best talent in the industry.

"Obviously without ACCTivate!, running some implementations and reports, we would need other people to hire on to do that for us, but ACCTivate! does it for us," Smeraglino said.

Mattingly Sports takes full advantage of the robust functionality ACCTivate! offers including some of the optional modules necessary for their business, such as the EDI Manager and Business Activity Management.

They do business with several retailers using EDI including Modell's Sporting Goods®, Sport Chalet, Sports Authority®, Dick's Sporting Goods® and Amazon.com.

"For the most part we feel that the EDI module is pretty robust for our total investment in ACCTivate!," Smith said.

Mattingly Sports uses the Business Activity Management module mainly for tracking Return Merchandise Authorizations (RMAs) and purchase order approval.

Smeraglino said the best part of handling RMAs in ACCTivate! is that they can email related information directly from the RMA business activity.

"We use the business activity to state the problem, put all the contact information and create another sales order for the product if we are replacing the product or giving them a credit," Smeraglino said.

The Business Activity Management module allows them to have different people involved with the RMA at different levels of the process. The process begins with a customer service representative and the functionality to assign the business activity to any user allows it to be passed to the appropriate people to complete the RMA, all while maintaining up-to-date records within the activity.

"That's how we circulate a purchase order through for approvals and that way we tie that business activity to a given purchase order. Then we have a record of its review and approval built into the system," Smith said about using business activities for managing purchase order approvals.

Mattingly Sports also uses the Shipping Workstation Interface module that integrates with their shipping workstation.

"Before there was just no visibility... It's great to see the orders prior to, it enables shipping to get ready for the orders a week or two prior if they are of a high volume," Smeraglino said.

Mattingly Sports finds the reporting capabilities in ACCTivate! to be a robust, as well.

"I've been the primary one to develop a lot of our internal reports and we've developed reports that are both higher level management based reports and also reports that are more functional in how they facilitate day to day processes, but the ability for us to go in and relatively easily through Crystal Reports to develop our own reporting mechanisms and our own tools has been a huge advantage," Smith said.

They have been able to develop a lot of reports internally, such as those to show open orders, what units are available to fill those orders, what has been sold in the past for sales analysis and some for product development needs.

"Just from top to bottom I think it's been a tremendous help for us. The support itself, if there is ever any problem, the support team is always very quick on responding and helping us out and that's been the biggest ease off my shoulders," Smeraglino said.

Mattingly has found great value in their decision to implement ACCTivate! as their business and inventory management system.

"We believed this when we made the purchasing decision and we certainly believe it much more so today for the price it's incredibly robust and certainly would handle the information that we needed to manage both at the time that we purchased it and we also felt like it would be able to grow with us to a fairly significant level of business on our side," Smith said.