QuickBooks® Inventory
Control and Business
Management Software

Pet Brands electronically does business with 25 stores using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) and within their 500,000 square foot warehouse there are over 11,000 bar coded locations — all managed with help from ACCTivate!.

As heavy technology users, they have experienced substantial time savings and improved accuracy in various areas of their business through the use of ACCTivate!’s EDI Manager, Mobile applications, bar coding functionality and the entire system overall.

Pet Brands imports brand name pet accessories and has been managing their operations with ACCTivate! since May 2008.

“We try to use everything that ACCTivate! offers and make the software more valuable to ACCTivate! customers,” Gary Nutter, Pet Brands’ Vice President and General Manager said.

Since Pet Brands began in 2004, their business has doubled every year.

After thorough evaluations of the weaknesses and strengths of a variety of inventory and business management solutions, Pet Brands chose ACCTivate! to handle their growth.

Jaime Kirk, Pet Brands’ Customer Order Manager, said prior to ACCTivate! they managed their business with two separate systems — QuickBooks® and an inventory system.

Having two systems that were not integrated required them to enter information manually into both.

“Managing data between two different systems and trying to balance it out was a headache,” Kirk said.

Kirk said now with ACCTivate! they are able to have all their information in one system.

ACCTivate! integrates with QuickBooks allowing synchronization of information between the two systems.

“The fact that ACCTivate! works with QuickBooks, price point and reporting was a big thing,” Nutter said as some of the main reasons they chose ACCTivate!.

Kirk also said that ACCTivate!’s integration to Crystal Reports® for reporting was why they chose ACCTivate! over a competitor.

She likes that all the information is stored in one database and can easily be brought up for reporting, which is a major improvement compared to storing information in Microsoft Excel as they did before.
 
Customization based on their business model is also a favorable feature for Pet Brands.

“I like the custom fields — a lot of other systems we looked at didn’t have custom anything,” Kirk said.

“ACCTivate! helps me establish better disciplines and controls in inventory management and in [barcode] scanning,” Nutter said.

In their warehouse, Pet Brands uses the recommended Motorola MC9090G handheld device with the ACCTivate! Mobile inventory receiving application to receive goods.

They are also currently testing the inventory transfers feature included with Mobile inventory management.

Brian Snow, Pet Brands’ IT Manager, said ACCTivate! Mobile allows them to manage their inventory more accurately and has taken a heavy burden off of some of their processing staff.

“Scanning makes it fun,” Jaime Kirk, Pet Brands’ Customer Order Manager, said about the mobile and barcoding capabilities.

She said they also use bar code scanning to perform administrative shortcuts. They save a considerable amount of time by using it with assemblies, which they do a lot of as co-packers.

Kirk prints barcodes for assembly components, not to receive them, but rather to scan the barcodes to quickly and automatically enter the product into the ACCTivate! rather than manually inputting it and risking inaccuracies and loss of productivity.

EDI is an extremely beneficial feature for Pet Brands, since they have many trading partners that require them to do business with them in this manner, such as PetSmart®, Wal-mart, Kroger, Big Lots and Target.

EDI has provided a streamline of efficiency at various levels for their business, through the supply chain from the order process to the shipping process, Snow said.

He also said that EDI comes along with many checks and balances that they wouldn't otherwise get if they used faxes or phone communications to do business with their trading partners.

“And we’re making the customers that require EDI happy at the same time — it’s always important to make them happy,” Nutter said

Before ACCTivate!, Pet Brands used only QuickBooks and TrueCommerce, a well-known EDI solution provider to do EDI.

With the addition of ACCTivate!, which integrates to both QuickBooks and TrueCommerce, EDI is now more automated.

ACCTivate! has partnered with TrueCommerce, a QuickBooks Gold Developer as well, to provide a streamlined end-to-end EDI solution for small and midsize businesses since 2007.

Snow said orders go into ACCTivate! directly and there is no need to key information into the system.

Even the implementation of the ACCTivate! EDI manager was simple, which involved connecting to over 20 EDI trading partners in one day.

“The implementation was transparent on our side. We provided information, there were some tweaks here and there and we were up and running by the afternoon that same day,” Snow said.

The Pet Brands staff is also pleased with the customer service they receive from the ACCTivate! team.

“The staff is very responsive. We get the courtesy, knowledge, know how and patience we deserve that we didn’t get with our old system,” Nutter said.

For more information on Pet Brands read their Customer Spotlight.