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Purchase Order creation is without a doubt a fundamental part of any inventory based business.

Without raw materials to manufacture and/or without goods to sell, well, what are we doing here exactly?

So now that we have relatively easily established PO’s are an important function… let’s get into why it’s a challenge in most businesses.

 

The Goal

 

Ensure with one click of a button that any staff member can view easily digestible Availability and Sales History data, so that they can easily make a purchasing decision, and then with one more click of a button create multiple PO’s correctly and efficiently.

 

The Challenge

 

1) There is a significant amount of data and guesswork analysis and guesswork experience required in deciding when and how much to order.

2) Both the decision and the process is often dependent on 1-2 key people in the business. Whilst the decision on what to buy should be a single responsibility of a purchaser, the ability to create purchase orders should not be a specialised task and/or a single point of failure if someone goes on holiday or decides to join the ‘Great Resignation’ sooner rather than later

3) Mistakes when creating PO’s cost big. Mistyping in a SKU or amount is difficult to check with a highly manual approach and easily made.

4) Most businesses have LOADS of SKU’s. Some of our clients are upwards of 10k SKU’s. Manually typing that in or messing around with CSV uploads is not efficient and again incredibly error prone

 

The Solution

The solution is essentially an ExcelAddIn – in a quick summary an ExcelAddIn is;

  • an application that runs inside an Excel Ribbon
  • still maintains the flexibility and ability for human eyeballing during an automated process
  • it is not Functions or Macros, but the same way Microsoft codes the rest of Excel
  • It allows developers to pull in data from external sources like API’s and databases
  • read and write data to any Excel sheet
  • repeatably and robustly code any domain or business logic into Windows Forms style controls
  • send data to other systems via API’s or direct to databases
  • allows auditing of operations and data manipulation

Phew, now that we understand that it’s a robust application layer that sits inside Excel let’s get on with explaining how an Excel AddIn built for DEAR PO Automation can work. Please remember this is all fully bespoke and therefore customisable!

 

 

Pre-requisite;

Your dataSights DataLake has your latest DEAR data synced and the SQL Views are setup by your trusty dataSights team to do the heavy Sales Info lifting

 

 

Step 1. Select filters to download availability and sales history data

 

Step 2. Click ‘Download’ button just once to download availability and sales history data

 

Step 3. Analyse data and make purchasing decisions

 

Step 4. Type Qty to put in PO in Order column

 

Step 5. Click ‘Create PO’ to create PO in DEAR

 

Step 6. Use your spare time to do some online shopping and (if in the office) when someone walks past your desk; hit Alt-Tab on Windows or CMD Tab on Mac to switch programs efficiently and effectively

 

 

 

 

The Results Testimonial

The PO ExcelAddIN that dataSights has created for us allows us to easily see which products need reordering by supplier. It not only provides stock level information but also reordering amounts and sales analysis data. This enables us to make better business decisions around our stock management and also saves us a lot of time as the plugin also creates a purchase order in Dear with a click of a button in excel!

Matthew Crick

Business Manager, Mercury Distribution

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Frequently asked questions

  • Create an account (Free trial available), create or bring an existing database, connect on the Connectors page, then Sync! Then follow a short video on how to use your database credentials to connect to Power BI in Direct query mode. Done!

  • Create an account (Free trial available), create or bring an existing database, connect on the Connectors page, then Sync! Then follow a short video on how to use your database credentials to connect to Excel. Done!

  • Create an account (Free trial available), create or bring an existing database, connect Xero on the Connectors page, then Sync! Then follow a short video on how to push your data to Google Sheets. Done!

  • Absolutely. Every customer gets their very own isolated data warehouse. Database credentials are salt-encrypted. Multi-factor authentication can be activated for your account. We take security very seriously.

  • Your reports can be updated daily, on-demand, and if it’s sales data as frequently as every 5 minutes.

  • Absolutely. We are software developers first, report developers second. Any data you need aggregated, calculated and pushed either via an ExcelAddIn or fully automated is no problem at all. Just get in touch and we can explore your requirements and offer multiple solution options.

  • We do! The templates will need some customisation, which either we can do, or you can do. Just get in touch and we can figure out how best to progress!

  • Absolutely. We are software developers first, report developers second. Any data you need pushed into either via an ExcelAddIn or fully automated is no problem at all. Just get in touch and we can explore your requirements and offer multiple solution options.

  • The choice is yours, or you can choose a combination, or we can coach you. Our only goal is to automate all our data, and guide you to 100% automated report automation.

  • We can consolidate multiple , Shopify’s, Hubspots, whatever systems you use, we can consolidate into a single Xero Sales table for example. Get in touch, and we would love to show you how OR start a FREE Trial and connect multiple Xero, and sync away!

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