With the holiday shopping season quickly approaching, ensuring your ecommerce business is prepared for the rush is top priority. Although we are slowly returning to pre-pandemic shopping norms, there is no doubt that vast numbers of consumers will be shopping online this year. There is pent-up demand, savings are high, and the stock market is in excellent condition, so expect consumers to be ready to shop. Business owners can prepare the back office for the holiday rush with these three essential apps for ecommerce.
1. Ecommerce inventory management
If inventory is your main asset this holiday season, having real-time insight into your supply will be crucial. With supply chain issues lurking around every corner, staying on top of your inventory will help to eliminate overselling and delayed shipping dates. What can a cloud inventory management system do for your business?
A system like Dear cloud inventory management allows you to set automatic stock reorder points, see real-time inventory, and automatically generate SKUs for holiday products. Managing additional holiday inventory can be stressful and overwhelming. If you’re utilizing drop-ship for holiday items you don’t keep on hand, Dear’s drop ship feature automates the process for you. Simply create the sales order, and then Dear automatically creates a purchase order for your supplier providing them with the shipment details needed to deliver, saving you time, paperwork, and the stress that comes with on-hand inventory.
One of the many benefits of Dear systems is the ability to integrate with some of our top choice cloud accounting apps for ecommerce businesses, including Xero, Shopify, and Square. The seamless integration makes adopting Dear a smooth process and saves business owners time by reducing the need to manually manage and enter inventory data in multiple locations.
2. Hire holiday help without the stress
The holiday rush can quickly become overwhelming if you’re trying to handle everything on your own or with a limited staff. If you plan to hire seasonal help, it may sound as simple as posting the job and interviewing a few candidates, but hiring employees and setting up payroll can be time-consuming at the moment when you have the least time to consume.
Gusto gives you total control over your payroll and human resource management while automating processes and simplifying the hiring and onboarding process. From creating the holiday help wanted job post and sending out offer letters to onboarding, time tracking, and payroll, Gusto is the HR tool your business needs. Particularly if you’re hiring your first employee, the payroll process can become confusing and tedious as you figure out how to file payroll taxes, possibly in multiple states. Payroll cloud accounting apps save business owners valuable time during the busy holiday season and are a great way to set up modern payroll and accounting practices.
3. Automate holiday expense tracking
The holiday shopping season doesn’t only mean an increase in revenue for ecommerce businesses, but also an increase in expenses. Along with those orders comes the need for additional shipping expenses, packaging materials, marketing—and don’t forget the in-office snacks and coffee to keep everyone fueled. Planning the annual office Christmas party? There’s another set of expenses to track.
Expense tracking is a tedious task, but essential to document for the biggest tax deduction possible. Utilizing a cloud-based expense management app, such as Expensify, allows business owners to SmartScan receipts and automatically code and report the expenses. When there is enough chaos during the holiday season, Expensify can help to eliminate a backup of manual data entry, ensuring every expense is properly documented. SmartScan your receipts from anywhere at any time to update and see a real-time report. Your pre-accounting process can be simplified and automated, preparing you for the upcoming tax season.
4. Link your ecommerce platform to your accounting
Are you still manually entering transactions in your accounting platform? As your business goes, and particularly during rush times, manual data entry becomes a huge hindrance to keeping up with your books. We recommend A2X to pull transactions from your ecommerce marketplace (such as Amazon, Shopify, Etsy, eBay, etc.) directly into your bookkeeping app (such as Xero or Quickbooks). You’ll gain time savings, not just in the data entry, but also by reducing human error. Further, you’ll be able to keep your books up to date with data from all the platforms you use, setting your business up to scale.
It’s not too late to adopt these essential apps for ecommerce in time for the holiday season. Our cloud accounting specialists can help you integrate the cloud-based apps fit for your business needs. The apps will not only give you back time this shopping season but set you up for modern, automated, streamlined accounting processes for years to come. Contact us to schedule a consultation today!