For Larger Retailers... Management Question

[Noodleman]

Hello peeps,

I have been using Cubecart for a while now, and my business is going quite well. I have been operating as a sole trader for quite some time, and have built up a lot of online customers using ebay, online store and other various locations, as well as high street shops.

I have now setup a ltd company, however i have yet to start trading under it because i want to make sure i have everything in place first.

My question is, what back end systems do people use to keep everything in sync?

For example, stock management, sales and purchase ledgers, invoices, purchase orders, customer and supplier details etc etc

I have been developing my own custom system to take care of it all for me, but it is taking a lot longer than i wanted and i wondered if there was any out of the box solutions that people could recomend?

Any recomendations greatly welcomed at the moment as my system is... well.... in bits (about 23,000 lines of code so far and about 2/3 of the way there after 6 weeks.)

Thanks in advance

[Guest EverythingWeb]

Hi Noodleman,

For general purpose accounts, VAT Returns (when you get over there, if not already) Sales/Purchase Ledgers, Bank Reconciliation etc then really, Sage is the perfect companion.

Quickbooks is okay, and is highly regarded in the USA, but over this side of the pond, Accountants and the general accountancy industry prefer Sage, with most supporting it and there being lots of features with it out of the box.

Sales from your CubeCart/ebay etc, really only need to be entered as single line invoices, rather than full blown item-code-price-invoices. However if you use stock control, then you will need to.

If you dont use stock control, import sales as single line items, handle your bank payments (setup different bank control account for PayPal, Bank etc) so you can apportion your processing fees out to a fee's nominal while maintaining the correct input on your sales ledger - else you'll get in a pickle!

If you want to drop me a PM, I can give you some recommendations on which version of Sage would suit you best, as I've had quite a bit of experience in this field :(