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Acctivate Inventory Management
What is Acctivate Inventory Management?
Built for growing product-selling businesses using QuickBooks (Online or Desktop), Acctivate is a premium inventory management & multi-channel order fulfillment add-on that helps you focus on growth without operational limitations.
Solve for QuickBooks limitations, including real-time inventory visibility, multi-warehousing, multi-channel orders, ecommerce fulfillment, EDI transaction support, barcoding, landed cost, lot and serial number traceability and more.
Who Uses Acctivate Inventory Management?
Small to medium size, product-selling businesses looking to get more out of QuickBooks by adding growth-focused inventory management and high-volume order fulfillment capabilities.
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Acctivate Inventory Management
Reviews of Acctivate Inventory Management
Inventory is easy with Acctivate
Comments: We were in need of an inventory software that could integrate with QuickBooks and provide a platform for our manufacturing crew to run out of. Acctivate met this need.
Pros:
I love that it easily integrates with QuickBooks Enterprise. It has a lot of options that are great for manufacturers. Their on-boarding team is phenomenal; I bugged them so much and yet they always seemed so happy to hear from me!
Cons:
It is expensive...BUT it's cheaper than most of it's competitors and from what I've seen, it's a better software than it's competitors. In my opinion, you get what you pay for; a great inventory software that easily integrates with QuickBooks.
Acctivate Response
6 years ago
Thank you for sharing your feedback. We are happy to hear that things are going great from the ease of use to the integration with QuickBooks and service from our onboarding team. - Erica
Very Reliable and Easy To Use
Pros:
Acctivate is perfect for QuickBooks users that need a better inventory and sales order process. It is a bolt on product. You just "sync" it whenever you want to have QB and Acctivate talk to each other. It makes managing inventory really easy- and gives you a ton of room and vendor history so you can manage your costs. It also makes price updates really easy. Initial integration is easy- all of the details are handled by Acctivate thru remote sign in on your first day. I suggest to have an IT person in house just to handle the small details- so you can concentrate on your business. I decided to go with Acctivate 5 years ago and have been Extremely Happy with this product. It is easy to use and is based on Crystal Reports - which means that you can get just about any report made - so you can get the specific dash boards you want or reports you want. Your employees will like using this product as well. My employees were using this by 10AM the morning we installed it. Once you have this product 90% of the time you will be operating out of Acctivate. You only use QB for the Book Keeping for the most part. Inventory control and unique inventory situations are easily handled by Acctivate. Overseas shipments or Lead Time Inventory is not a problem- Acctivate has a solution for this. Your Pack Slip, Sales Orders and Invoices will look a lot better with this product. If this product doesn't pay for itself in 1 year or less- I would be very surprised. Excellent Product.
Cons:
I dont have any complaints. After an initial set up- i do suggest using a 3rd party for special reports. But you dont have to do this. Activate can help you if you want work with them. I just like having a 3rd party vendor - but i make a ton of reports. Acctivate comes with enough reports to run your business.
Seriously do your due diligence on this software before considering.
Comments: Works good until you start learning how things actually work in Acctivate. Customer service is terrible. They will not help you past the onboarding process, unless you pay rather large service contracts each year. Videos and help site are too generic to even help you understand how to do something. Unwilling to take feedback. Just an inferior product that will keep taking your money. We are cutting our losses and moving on.
Pros:
Ability to set tiered pricing for each customer and have it "pop up" on quotes or orders. Landed cost by weight was nice as well.
Cons:
Inventory management, especially inventory counts did not work. Basic principles of accounting did not work and/or sync correctly with QuickBooks. Their so-called "CRM" was nothing more than note taking. Inconsistencies in verbiage used across quotes, sales orders, Invoices and reports. Very few reports that actually provide good info to run a business, so we ended up running reports through QuickBooks. Or, we'd need to purchase Crystal reports and hire an experience CR programmer. Only runs in 32-bit data while most every other software runs on 64-bit data so integrations don't work well. Their "customer/invoice history" was difficult at best to determine AR issues. Customer service told us that even if Microsoft or QuickBooks were to change their coding, Acctivate would NOT fix their code so customers could continue using Acctivate. You would need to purchase a service contract and only after shelling out thousands of dollars, would they fix the software (you already purchased in full) so that it would work again. Felt like we were being held hostage on an inferior product. They make their money on service on over-priced contracts. Their arrogance was amazing!
Acctivate is excellent; start to finish. It plainly works without any hitches! Plus, great service!!
Pros:
The integration with QuickBooks works seamlessly. The product is very easy to use; it is very intuitive. You just simply need to know the sequence of steps and in a few clicks, perfectly formatted forms are ready for printing. The reports are well organized, informative, and great tools for analysis. The customer service team is patient and hard working. Some tech companies talk down to non-techies, but Acctivate is patient and quick to educate in terms someone can understand, follow, and implement. Also, when educating, they run video seminars or can email screen shots to you very effectively. I cannot over estimate how much time they saved me, because they are so good in the customer service arena.
Cons:
There is nothing that I don't like about the software, except maybe the cost. However, we are in business and they are in business, so I don't begrudge anyone for making a living and earning a profit. What would someone pay for an inventory management system that works without a flaw in a QuickBooks environment? If you were a huge company you may say tens of thousands. If you are in a small company like mine, you might say a few thousand once. Instead the cost is an annual amount and that's just the way they price it, which is okay.
Acctivate Response
7 years ago
Ken, it was great working with you to implement Acctivate. I¿m happy to hear all the specific successes your business is experiencing after adding the power of Acctivate to QuickBooks. Our entire team looks forward to a continued partnership with Respect Foods and helping you all grow even more with the software. Thank you for taking the time to let us know how things are going and helping others in their inventory software decision process. - Brad
Wolf Companies
Comments: The Costing trail for Inventory items lacks reports that show how current cost is calculated.
Pros:
Fairly easy to use. Is a good overall value.
Cons:
Lack of Print screen feature which is helpful when researching transactions.
Acctivate Response
6 years ago
Randy, thank you for taking the time to let us know how things are going with Acctivate. Taking screen shots is definitely helpful and Windows can be used to capture your full screen, as well as third-party screen capture utilities, in which many are free. In terms of seeing how cost is calculated, the Inventory Ledger report can provide the information you need. This is found under Acctivate¿s Inventory Management Reports > Transactions. Make sure to select a beginning transaction date and the report will show the true cost calculated by dividing the resulting value by the resulting quantity on hand. If you need any assistance with this, please contact support at 817-870-1311 or online at https://help.acctivate.com/requests/. - Erica
Alternatives Considered:
Acctivate is Amazing
Pros:
Acctivate is easy to use and helps us process orders, keep track of inventory, and create bill of materials among many other great features.
Cons:
Integration was very easy, Acctivate is always willing to help with our needs.
This software is very important to our business.
Comments: Reduced the time that it took to manually invoice everything. Before it would take us about 5 hours to manually invoice now it takes 5 minutes.
Pros:
We sell in many different type of online marketplaces so it is great that we are able to sync all the orders from all the sites in one place.
Cons:
This software is 100% eficiente in inventory control but it lack the capability to do some extensive accounting.
Acctivate Response
7 years ago
Paul, thank you for letting us know how we're doing! Yes, one of the main reasons people choose Acctivate is exactly what you described - reducing manual methods which speed up processes across the entire business. We appreciate the kind feedback which allows others to make an important decision when evaluating the right inventory solution to help grow their business.
Helpful
Pros:
It works great if it's utilized properly.
Cons:
Invoice options are limited to certain fields and designs
Acctivate Response
6 years ago
Teresa, We are happy to hear that Acctivate is a helpful solution for your business. We offer many resources to help ensure that users maximize Acctivate, and I trust that you have gotten use of them based on your positive feedback. I just wanted to provide more detail to inform others. During the onboarding process, an Acctivate expert works closely with new customers on using Acctivate for their specific needs; and the online help site (https://help.acctivate.com/) has plentiful resources, on-demand. After onboarding, our support team can be utilized. For the invoice design/field limitations, there¿s a few options available: You can use Crystal Reports, which integrates with Acctivate to customize any report/doc; you can reach out to our support team at 817-870-1311 or [email protected] for minor modifications; or we can recommend an Acctivate Consulting Partner for larger customization projects. Thank you for sharing, Erica Avila
I am using this program for about a year and a halfe it is a good program with lots of features
Pros:
I find it very usefull for order management it is a perfect program to keep track of your orders. The atta hed email section is very usefull. You can always keep track of conversations between a user and clients.
Cons:
I don't find it to be stable all of the time it crashes a lot unfortunately. It is also difficult when you want to edit a product when you make a mistake you will need to close the program and opend it all the way again because it does not let you continue with your work.
Acctivate Response
6 years ago
Otniel, thank you for your input. One of our team members will be reaching out directly to discuss our recent update, Acctivate 10.3 that can deliver more stability to your system. ¿ Erica Avila
I have implemented 3 successful Acctivate implementations.
Pros:
The product integrates with Quickbooks better than competing products (i.e., Fishbowl). The product is stable, in SQL, and the database is well organized, normalized, which lends itself to reporting. I like the posting process overall (much easier than a batch system - i.e., Sage 100). The vendor provides excellent support and has outstanding, knowledgeable, helpful support staff.
Cons:
I compare the product to other mid-market software that I implement (i.e., Sage 100, Great Plains, NetSuite). The product has limited functionality in some key areas: user-defined fields are limited, importing data into data entry processes such as purchase order, the data entry flow leaves much to be desired - having to click on fields, tab sequence, limited ability to default values in sales order entry to make the data entry process go faster, smoother. This can lead to errors in data entry.
The system crashes periodically, and there are some glitches.
Comments: We are able to keep account information, process and track orders and manage most of our complaints and returns.
Pros:
We can use it with QuickBooks. I work with complaints, and the activity feature is useful in this department.
Cons:
There are some glitches like when an order is made next day air, it will show as being shipped ground in Aactivate. Invoices will only show one shipping tracking number. The system crashes periodically, which is particularly difficult when I have multiple windows open.
Acctivate Response
7 years ago
We appreciate your transparent feedback and apologize for any inconvenience you have been experiencing. Our Support team reviews each and every request carefully so we can better understand how to fix whatever challenges you are experiencing. If you are still experiencing difficulty, please give us a call at 817-870-1311 or open a request at http://help.acctivate.com, our experienced support team is standing by ready to help you (Monday - Friday).
customer service is very poor
Comments: they set everything up, even quickbook categories with no explaination and year end i had to hire a certified quickbooks person to fix my reports with no help from acctivate
Pros:
clean screens not too busy. can access everything on one screen
Cons:
alot of screens to update inventory, too many steps and screens to update. they do not know much about quickbooks
Overall great investment
Comments: Overall this has been a great investment. We are a medium sized company who sells multi-level assemblies as well as services, and have all of our accounting in Quickbooks. The integration between Acctivate and QB has proven quite valuable. We initially intended on putting products and services sales through Acctivate, but have since decided to keep services transactions solely in QB. The platform gives us real-time visibility into key data that we were previously tracking across multiple spreadsheets which required ongoing effort to keep updated, and yet the data was still never as fresh as you'd want. It has taken some time to settle in, but across our company folks now have their dashboards and other features customized to display meaningful info and metrics for each individuals' area of responsibility. We have already been able to change the way we make decisions, doing things more efficiently today and with a higher degree of certainty than we had in the past. The two primary cons I run into are : 1) not being able to customize the reports and templates (my organization does not have Crystal Reports), and 2) I wish we are able to select which fields display in certain activities. Both of these would make the system more user friendly, however there are certainly ways to work around each issue.
Why do I love Acctivate? Let me count the ways....
Pros:
Top-notch functionality and support. It uses SQL for the database and Crystal Reports for reporting which are expected these days for products of this type. The amount of detail and functionality is amazing. The programmers are awesome in some of the functionality they have come with. As an accountant, I can fully recommend the product to prospects without fear of a core functionality or need missing.
Cons:
No online product, unless you use a hosting company.
Acctivate - Inventory Solution for the Growing SMB
Pros:
Love the fact that it is scalable, modules can be added one at a time, as the company grows. I also love the customer center as it incorporates great CRM functionality, many sales analysis at the users' fingertips, rather than having to run so many reports.
Cons:
Wish it would integrate with QBO. I also wish it would have more integration with payroll.
Great product
Pros:
Easy to use, great help from activate for setup, all customer records are transparent, well organized, so does the inventory.
Cons:
reports are always a struggle, using crystal report need some training. We have hard time to get the reports we need. Activate people are great, very helpful and personal.
Acctivate is very easy to use. An excellent solution for inventory managment for the QB company.
Comments: By implementing Acctivate, I was able to bring my company out of the small buisness way of thinkig and introduce them to an inventory managment software that is super easy to learn and use. We grew from 5-7M to over 20M very quickly and we were basically managing our buisness with spreadsheets and elbow grease. We're a company that uses Intuit QB for our financials. Prior to Acctivate we stored our inventory in QB but as the company grew, we kept crashing our file. Acctivate was the perfect scalable solution toallow us to add POS and lessen the weight on our QB file. Now 15 months after implementating Acctivate, it's hard to imagine how we operated before. Acctivate also forced us to face our own "bad habits" in the areas of process. That may be the single most valuable "pro" that comes with the software.
Acctivate is the best inventory add on for QuickBooks.
Pros:
Implementation of acctivate is a smooth and painless process. Learning a new software can sometimes be stressful but acctivate is intuitive and easy to use.
Cons:
Would love it if acctivate had more manufacturing features.
It's very easy to use
Comments: Make cheaper in order everything small warehouse to use
Pros:
Increase profit and inventory security Highly efficiency in industry, reduce loss in the warehouse
Cons:
High expensive to implement, Need education to users, technology changed in every second so must need to go with it
A+ Easy to Use & Service is Outstanding
Comments:
The software is easy to use. It's also very easy to teach yourself and learn new ways to use the system as well. All the self help forums are very helpful and informative. Also the remote support team is absolutely amazing. They are quick to respond and make things better if you are stuck or having an issue you can not fix.
One con I have is that you can not attached a file to an email being sent from ACCtivate. Other than that not too many cons. When I do I learn from them and then i know the system that much better.
Outstanding Capability for the price.
Comments: The Acctivate Inventory system has been a great asset in helping our company achieve it's inventory tracking needs. The integration with our QuickBooks Wholesale Manufacturing Edition works well. We have been able to generate far more decision making reports with the help of some 3rd party customization. In the past the support was somewhat of an issue, but that seems not to be a problem anymore. Highly recommend for small to midsize companies with complex manufacturing and inventory needs.
Inventory Management Software that Does It All
Pros:
This software is very thorough. What do I mean by that? It can do almost anything you need it to do when it comes to managing your inventory. What I like best about the Activate Inventory software is it's integration to QuickBooks. Because it integrates so well there doesn't have to be a lot of double data entry. Data flows transparently in both directions. Also, their staff are really wonderful at helping you - they're easy to talk over challenges with, and always ready to help.
Cons:
I can't think of anything that I disliked about the product.
Best Customer Service!
Comments: While the system itself can be frustrating and is not as user-friendly or dummy-proof as QuickBooks, the customer service is fantastic. Over all, our experience with the tech support rep Eric and the customer rep John has been absolutely phenomenal. They consistently check with us and always answer any questions in a quick, professional, and friendly fashion. I would absolutely recommend based on the customer service alone.
I have been involved with the implementation since day one and use it daily.
Comments:
Pros: We have been able to utilize our inventory and customer information more effectively than in the past.
Cons: Some standard features are different than how our previous software worked so getting used to that has taken some time. We were surprised some features were not available.
Scott Gregory and the customer service has been exceptional in helping us resolve and understand issues as they arise.
Once you know the proper step procedure, the software is easy to use.
Comments: Pros: gives accurate data. friendly to use. You can cross reference in many areas to get the information needed. Cons: Have to know the proper step procedure to enter invoices, credits, sales order. Once you have the procedure it's easy. Can't revise a purchase order or change a purchase order past a certain step. Too many steps to correct an incorrect price on a purchase order for a vendor.