The Best Order Entry Software
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Your customers don’t want to deal with the wrong order being delivered. They’re also not fond of billing mistakes, provisioning delays, or late shipments. Of course, you don’t want them to deal with any of these things either! Order entry software can help you make sure that you are filling the right orders without mistakes and delivering on your customer purchases as soon as possible. With the right software, you can do all of that while you lower operational costs.
What Is Order Entry Software?
Order entry software coordinates the business processes and document workflow involved in delivering goods and services to customers. Order entry software provides both internal instructions for order fulfillment and enables the creation of customer facing order documentation such as shipping notices and invoices.
Business benefits of order entry software include:
- Automation of order-to-cash processes
- Prevention of errors in order fulfillment
- Enhanced customer satisfaction through improved delivery times
- Reductions in labor through intelligent order execution instructions that enable economies of scale with batch order processing
- Lower administrative costs related to order status monitoring
Key Features of Order Entry Software
| Functionality | Definition |
|---|---|
| Order status tracking | Order status tracking provides visibility into the position of orders in the order fulfillment process and allows sales staff to communicate expected delivery timeframes |
| Invoice creation | Invoice creation capabilities allow sales staff to create billing documents detailing customer payment obligations |
| Recurring order management | Recurring order management capabilities allow scheduling and document creation coordination for customer orders which should be repeated at periodic intervals |
| Shipping integration | Software interfaces with shipping carrier (UPS, FedEx, etc) systems allow order submitters to initiate shipping tasks and create lables and other shipping documentation through the central order system |
| Order cloning | The ability to duplicate previous orders offers a simple means of improving efficiency when creating new orders |
| Order verification and error detection | Conditional logic can be set up to monitor for unusual order conditions which may indicate an error order (unrecognized shipping addresses, abnormal item quantities, etc) |
| Back order management | Back order management enables communication between inventory or other modules to trigger orders when stock conditions have been met that allow for the order to be fulfilled |
| Pick tickets | Pick tickets provide instructions on how and where to gather inventory for order fulfillment |
| Pack lists | Pack lists describe the items that should be packed in a given customer shipment and are an important piece of both internal/external order documentation |
| Returns management authorization (RMA) | RMA functionality provides features to coordinate the successful completion of tasks associate with the return of items |
| Quote-order-invoice conversion | Document conversion capabilities that manage the conversion of quotes into orders into invoices create a more efficient administrative process than recreating new document types from scratch |
| Purchase order reconciliation | Integration between purchase orders and sales orders can be used to create alerts when items are available for fulfillment among other business tasks |
| Product configurator | Product configurator tools allow for the designation of complex multi-part or multi-product assemblies |
| Time-to-delivery estimation | Reporting tools that can analyze order fulfillment and shipping data and extrapolate estimates for future order delivery estimation are useful for helping sales personnel accurately predict when customers will receive goods |
| Address verification | Address verification tools (typically provided by 3rd party API integration) can be useful in overcoming a common source of order errors |
| Sales tax management | Sales tax management tools support tax determination and rate look-up activities and can speed order taking as well as ensure adequate tax is collected to meet tax remittance requirements |
Order Entry Software: Helping You Fill Orders Faster
It’s no secret that we live in a “now” oriented consumer society. At every level of commerce, customers expect quality delivered quickly. With the internet’s ability to minimize the importance of proximity, your business has more competition than ever. More options for customers means customers with less and less patience for errors and delays. Today, the most successful companies are looking to take advantage of this business climate. Where there is an opportunity for differentiation, there exists an opportunity for increased market share and customer satisfaction. How can you ensure that your order and fulfillment processes are providing you with a real competitive advantage?
An order entry software module allows you to record customer orders, communicate client requests for service and products to the relevant internal parties, and create receipts or invoices for your customers’ orders. Some order entry software applications also allow you to convert quotes into sales orders. Integration with inventory control can help your staff determine the product availability. With an order entry system you can easily pull customer contact information, purchase history, and specific discounts.
Comprehensive Order Control With Order Entry Software
Order entry software provides a centralized set of tools for managing your orders from creation-to-cash. The end-result is quickly and accurately fulfilled orders. An integrated approach to the entire order process helps you ensure consistent information flows from between departments in real-time. Access to consolidated data means less time spent describing what’s going on and more accountability at every stage. Eliminating data re-entry is another important characteristic of the effective order entry system. Killing off manual re-keying of data greatly reduces the opportunities for errors and promotes processing productivity.
Order Entry Software Integration
Order entry software does more than just create orders and invoices. It is the module that provides the central intelligence that coordinates the order related activities of inventory control, purchasing, receivables, payables, and a variety of other applications. Integrated order entry software allows you to create customer orders, develop billing documents, create pick tickets, generate packing slips, prepare shipping info, make inventory adjustments, and track deliveries.