ideas-and-tool: Accounting of inventory

Decode Science

Decode Science has used Cin7 since its founding. Twenty years of experience in the life sciences and diagnostics sector had taught Director Josh Warburton that inventory software was something he could not live without.

“I’ve worked in other businesses, and if you don’t have a good operating system for your inventory, it kills you,” Josh says. “Cin7 had the functionality that we required and needed minimal optimization to implement into our business.”

Enabling Discovery Throughout Oceania

Based in the Melbourne suburb of Carrum Downs, Decode Science imports and distributes medical research and clinical diagnostics equipment to facilities across Australia and New Zealand. “We’re direct-to-business distribution model, so the customers that we sell to consume the product, typically.”

Their clients include universities, medical research institutions and hospital labs, so it’s literally vital that their customers get the correct products within the required time frame. Decode Science carries laboratory equipment, reagents and plasticware for cancer and cardiovascular research, neuroscience, genomics, developmental biology and even agricultural biology. Items they sell include next-generation DNA-sequencing machines and library preparation solutions for whole-genome mapping.

“It’s a combination of research and in vitro diagnostics for things like cancer, coronavirus,” Josh explains. Since the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, Decode Science has seen an increase in demand from diagnostic test labs.

In layman’s terms, “What customers are doing most commonly is, they’re taking DNA from the world or RNA from the world and they’re turning that into data using our machines. So they’re taking the DNA and sequencing it to identify the code of that DNA.”

A Collaborative Onboarding Approach

Before going out on his own to helm Decode Science’s team of nine, former biologist Josh was a manager at a larger company in the same industry, with business units specializing in medical devices, diagnostics and life sciences. Which is why he knew from the outset that skimping on inventory management would be an unwise decision.

“We’re using inventory and the associated purchasing and sales order management that goes with it and then the Xero integration and reporting as well.”

Josh describes the onboarding experience as “well-handled.” A dedicated onboarding specialist took the team through training, troubleshooting and data management. “It was a very collaborative type of approach that got us up and running in about two or three weeks with something that was functional.”

Dependability Is in Their DNA

Being quick to market is crucial in the breaking world of bioscience technology, so Decode Science was pleased with the speedy implementation of Cin7 and minimal need for intervention.

“[Decode Science] is all B2B, but our sales process is a little bit more combination B2C/B2B.” By this, Josh means they use relationship building as a key sales strategy, partnering with companies like Bionano Genomics to host seminars to educate the medical community on emerging genetic technologies.

And because Decode Science performs this integrated sales and marketing function in-house with a very lean and agile team, less time spent managing orders is certainly welcome. While Josh knows that many small businesses operate on a shoestring budget, he says he “actually can’t imagine” being without Cin7. “I can’t imagine running a business off an Excel spreadsheet. [Inventory management software] is a relatively low-cost part of it.”

Invisawear

The brainchild of engineering students-turned-entrepreneurs Rajia Abdelaziz and Ray Hamilton, Invisawear jewelry is embedded with hidden Bluetooth technology that alerts up to five emergency contacts should you find yourself in need of help. The way it works is simple: If you’re in a jam, just double-click the back of the charm to instantly text your preprogrammed emergency contacts, complete with a link to a Google map of your exact location. A free 911 feature, if enabled, can even connect your contacts with the police.

The idea for Invisawear was born a little over three years ago, when Rajia, leaving the engineering lab late one night, was accosted by a carful of men, one of whom got out of the vehicle and pursued her on foot. In her panic, she was unable to operate her phone to call for help, though, fortunately, she managed to get to her car and drive away unharmed.

“We were talking after about how so many people aren’t so lucky, and we wanted to do something about it,” recalls Ray. “So we actually looked online for some safety devices and everything was a big, hideous panic button.”

Rajia’s 80-year-old grandmother had told her that she’d rather fall and not be able to get up than be caught dead wearing any of the panic buttons currently on the market, so Rajia certainly didn’t want to wear something like that either.

Handily, Rajia had a background in software development while Ray’s background was in hardware engineering, so the two of them set about designing a prettier panic button.

Part of a class project at the University of Massachusetts Lowell, about 30 miles north of Boston, their idea won an innovation challenge that funded the initial prototype. After two more years of development, Invisawear finally launched.

Five Very Thankful Customers

“We’ve been on the market for a little over a year now, and we’ve actually saved five lives this past year, so it’s been very exciting,” Ray says. In one particular case, Invisawear came to the rescue in an unanticipated way. Though the product was designed with the aim of preventing assaults, one user spun out on an icy highway and was badly injured in the ensuing crash. She couldn’t find her phone, and passersby who stopped to help soon found they were in a dead zone and unable to reach 911.

“Her aunt actually got her the keychain just two weeks prior. She kept pressing it over and over, saying, ‘Please, God, don’t die.’ Her dad got the alert and drove straight there. He got there in less than 10 minutes, at the same time as the police and the ambulance. Her whole family’s been our biggest supporters. They called all the local news stations and were like, ‘You guys need to know about this product,’ so we actually got some really great press coverage after that.”

The product currently comes in 12 variations that include necklaces, bracelets, keychains, unisex styles and matching pieces for layering, should the wearer desire a different, dressier look. Rose gold and black leather cord have recently been added to the lineup of traditional gold and silver. Starting at $129, Invisawear is available through the brand’s direct-to-consumer website as well as on Amazon and works anywhere in the US, though an update that will allow the app to function internationally as well is in the final testing stage.

A Close Partnership with Amazon

Invisawear began shipping its products in August 2018 and made Amazon part of its strategy from the start. A member of a program called Amazon Exclusives, Invisawear receives training and marketing support from Amazon and has even met with their executive team in Seattle.

“They think we’re one of the up-and-coming brands, so we love Amazon! We also use them for multichannel fulfillment, so all of our website orders actually get shipped out by Amazon, even if they don’t place the order on Amazon.com, because they can ship faster and cheaper than we can.”

Cin7’s integration with Amazon was one of the major reasons Invisawear chose Cin7: “We noticed that there weren’t a lot of alternatives that had that ability, and that’s one of the major things that we use.”

But that doesn’t mean that Invisawear’s inventory was as well-planned from the start. “To be honest, we didn’t have any sort of inventory management, other than Excel. It was very disorganized, and we were growing to a point where we needed to be able to keep track of things. We’ve got a lot of moving parts in different locations where we do assembly, and we’re also switching models. Before, we used to order all of our parts, then assemble them and then have product in stock, fully assembled. But now, we’re trying to switch to buying all of our raw materials in bulk and having them in stock, ready to go, just because the lead times will be a lot quicker. We’ve learned this past year that we always want to be ready for any sort of publicity or type of event that could help set the trajectory for our company,” he says, as with the sudden news coverage mentioned earlier.

Ray and Rajia were flying in from California on a redeye when it happened. “We got in at 9am and we got all these phone calls from all these news stations, saying, ‘We want to come do a story on you. We’ll be at your office in half an hour, and the story is going to air tonight at 6pm.’ We were panicked but, luckily, we were fully stocked with all of our inventory. But we always want to be prepared for something like that, especially as we go national and then international as well.”

Streamlined Manufacturing Processes

Cin7 has been instrumental in helping Invisawear prepare for such opportunities. After a couple of weeks of onboarding in May 2018, they were up and running with Cin7 by the beginning of June. “We’ve been loving it ever since. It’s actually been really helpful to keep track of all of our production jobs. Certain little parts get used in the actual makeup of our products, so it helps us keep track of where the parts are moving, from one facility to another. It’s been working really well so far.”

Locations include Invisawear’s headquarters in Lowell; manufacturing facilities in Chelmsford, the next town over; and jewelry suppliers in Rhode Island and Maryland. Before sending inventory to Amazon for distribution, which includes free two-day shipping, they put some aside to sell at the many events and trade shows they attend.

“After that news story aired, we sold out of four months’ worth of inventory in less than two weeks, then we were scrambling to get everything back in stock. We ended up taking a lot of back orders, and people had to wait two months to get their orders. They were emailing us all the time, saying, ‘Where’s my order? Why do I have to wait this long?’ So we don’t want that to happen again, and that’s another way Cin7 has helped us.

“One of the tools that we love is the Smart Buyer tool, because we’re growing very quickly and we want to be able to order all these raw materials, have them in stock, and control all of these moving parts so that we don’t have another incident where we run out of inventory and we’re scrambling to get everything back in stock again.”

As cofounder and chief technology officer, Ray wears many hats and appreciates the time savings that Cin7 provides. “I handle a lot of the technology design as well as operations. My main role recently is managing the supply chain and manufacturers, and then my partner is the CEO and cofounder, so we work alongside each other. We’re a small company, so we do both do more than just simple daily activities; every day is different in the startup world. I do customer support, I help out with different marketing strategies and meetings, finance as well. So just about everything!”

Having Cin7 in place has allowed the company to spend less time on admin tasks while supporting its overseas expansion. When Invisawear launches to more than 200 foreign territories in the coming weeks, it will work “just about everywhere. We’re looking to hire quite a few more people this next year to help out with customer support and tech support as we continue to get more users. We want to be able to offer the best customer service possible, so that’s one of the things that we’re looking to grow towards. We’re probably going to leverage Amazon for a lot of the shipping. We might also ship a lot of it directly from our warehouse to start. We’ll see how that goes.

Gritomatic

The company now known as Gritomatic was born in Moscow, in 2012. At the time, the small family-run business, called RuChef, consisted of just owner Konstantin Martynenko and his wife, Olga, and dealt in kitchenware of all kinds.

After noticing surprisingly strong sales of a particular sharpening system, the pair decided to focus exclusively on the knife-sharpening category: “We sell sharpening tools to sharpen knives, scissors, tools and different blades, but knives are the major aspect of our business,” said Konstantin. “All our customers own knives.”

About half of Gritomatic’s sales are guided knife-sharpening systems made by different brands and half are sharpening stones. While sharpening can be performed freehand, with just a knife and a stone, it requires skill to do correctly, hence the need for guided sharpening systems. “We want to supply many sharpening systems because we feel that there are many new innovations from different countries and different brands.”

The Gritomatic team now includes three more people based in Russia, two in Moscow and one in Irkutsk. “But just because we are small doesn’t make things simple,” said Konstantin. Doing business first in Russia and now in the United States, Gritomatic considers itself an international company.

“If we start discussing Cin7 or similar systems, they have to be compatible with US dollars, euros, Russian rubles. We have to put in the system that we have inventory in different countries. If we have inventory [in Russia], we cannot make it available in the United States because the logistics are very long.”

TradeGecko Not up to the Task

A fundamental lack of flexibility made it impossible for Gritomatic to continue using TradeGecko. “Maybe three years ago, we gave up. We spent a lot of time putting everything in their systems so of course, it was a disappointment for us.”

What kind of problems were they experiencing? As Konstantin explains it, TradeGecko sends the sum inventory of multiple warehouses to Shopify rather than separating inventory by location.

“It was impossible to prevent it,” he said. Why is this such a big issue? “If we don’t have stock of some product [in the US] but we have stock in Russia, we cannot sell it on Shopify because our web store is for American customers. Or if we have some in a warehouse for internal needs, it should not become available on our web store.

“In Cin7, I can say that I want one warehouse to be connected with Shopify and that’s it. I can have a Russian warehouse, I can have a warehouse connected to Amazon FBA. I can have different ones but only one connected to Shopify, and that’s the point.”

FBA as a Stop-Gap

After their split with TradeGecko, Gritomatic relied solely on Fulfillment by Amazon to ship their international orders so they didn’t felt the need for an inventory management system. Then, in 2015, Konstantin and Olga moved to the US and opened a branch in Cartersville, Georgia, 30 minutes from Atlanta. “We wanted to be able to do fast and inexpensive shipping, so we had to be close to a transport hub.”

While FBA had worked well enough for a time, it was also extremely limiting, with “many issues related to customer satisfaction. When you send 10 or 20 orders per month, Amazon is perfect. But when you send a lot of orders, the micromanagement of orders that are lost or delayed becomes very time-consuming.”

Back then, about 80% of their sales came from Amazon and just 20% from their Shopify website, which for Konstantin, felt “very risky.” Deciding it was better to start handling their own fulfillment, Gritomatic opened a warehouse at their Cartersville facility last June.

It was around this time that Konstantin resumed his search for an inventory management solution that was compatible with their new business model. After trying several other inventory management systems, Gritomatic began using Cin7 last September. Now 60% of orders originate from Gritomatic’s own website, with maybe 35% from Amazon and 5% from eBay.

“We tried maybe six systems, and only with Cin7 did we get the feeling that the developers understand what they’re doing. Core Cin7 is fantastic. Our products are about bundles, and the support of bundles in Cin7 is extraordinary.”

Cin7: Best for Bundles

What’s in these bundles? “We sell knife sharpeners and we sell sharpening stones. And there is no one universal stone set, so we offer different stone sets. It’s like a product matrix: You can choose a sharpening system and you can choose a sharpening stone set.”

“[Bundles in Cin7] are implemented so smart that we started to extend the number of our bundles and kits.” When Gritomatic began, they had maybe five bundles, 10 tops. “Right now, we have approximately 100 bundles and we plan to offer maybe 100 or more. I doubt any other system could help us [in the same way].”

Gritomatic carries sharpening systems made in the US, Russia, Ukraine, China and more. “All of these systems can use our sharpening stones. We offer a variety of sharpening stone bundles because people own different knives: everyday carry knives or kitchen knives, hard steel more expensive knives, or soft steel less expensive knives.”

The sharpening stones Gritomatic carries are mostly synthetic, made of diamond particles or more advanced materials like cubic boron nitride, silicon carbide or aluminum oxide, all of which have different properties and costs. They also carry natural stone, though Konstantine describes this as a “very niche” category and rates synthetic stones as superior in every way. “They are more predictive and less expensive to manufacture. They are faster. They are more universal for different materials.”

What’s Next

Russia is Gritomatic’s primary market in terms of sales, but if Konstantin has his way, that will soon change. “We think that our American business will be larger, just because of the economy size.” Production, however, is based in Russia and will remain there, due to lower labor and equipment costs.

As for the future, Gritomatic has big plans: “We want to be the biggest seller of guided knife-sharpening systems.” Konstantin wants people to understand that they don’t have to be confined to proprietary systems like Lansky, the most well-known brand. “Lanksy is okay, but it’s only a few diamonds of different grades and that’s it. You cannot experiment; you cannot try different stones. You just have to stick to the system. All our sharpening systems are not proprietary, so owners of our systems can have access to hundreds of thousands of different stones—not just from us, but from the market.”

Konstantin also wants to improve cost calculations. “That’s one of our priorities. I see how much precision of cost calculations Cin7 can offer, and your competitors don’t do this.” He also wants to make better use of Cin7’s Xero integration. “When we buy, when we sell, when we have a production job, when we have a movement of stock from one place to another. We don’t use Xero for that, but we need to, and we will.”

Childsmart

Childsmart was founded in the early 2000s to fill a gap in the market for quality and innovative children’s products in Australia. Retailers were hungry for more than just commodity goods, and Childsmart seized the opportunity to bring quality baby brands to Australian retailers.

The company quickly became a one-of-a-kind kids’ product distributor, growing its range to include toys and games, puzzles and educational DVDs, nursery gear and equipment, furniture and even drinks.

“We look at distribution as not just being focused on a particular category, but also being focused on bringing solutions to our retail partners,” says Managing Director Stanley Ichikowitz. “So over time, we’ve covered the whole gamut of products from pre-birth to about eight or nine-year-old kids. It’s amazing to sell these products that add value and bring joy to families and their kids.”

A Changing Market Reality 

Childsmart grew by building relationships with independent retailers and some national chains. Their sales team met face-to-face with 50 or so customers a month, Stanley says. But as in other markets, ecommerce, retail consolidation and a lack of consumer confidence and spending took a toll on Australia’s brick-and-mortar stores.

“Online was starting to become a player, and a lot of the independent retailers as we knew them were falling by the wayside,” Stanley says.

Sales volume increased as Childsmart’s business shifted to online stores and retail chains, but orders were now coming in for one or two items. All these changes strained how the distributor operated, from the sales team to how Childmart processed, picked, packed and shipped orders in its warehouse.

“We had to change how we engaged with the retailers, the product range we gave them and how we fulfill orders,” Stanley says. “In the past, we used to have a rep that would go out with a paper price list and take orders in the store. Now we had to ask if we had the right resources allocated correctly; if we were getting the right value out of what we were doing and how we were doing it.”

A Distributor Redefines Itself

Childsmart took a number of decisions to make-over their business model. This required they revisit how they processed orders, among other changes.

“We found that our inventory management systems and the way we were running our business with our own warehouse facility and our own teams just was not providing the returns that we required,” Stanley says.

The company had relied for years on spreadsheets to process and track orders while using MYOB Exo for accounting and inventory management. Neither made sense anymore as Childsmart’s business shifted increasingly online.

“We were touching pieces of paper too many times, handling orders way too many times for it to be profitable or efficient for the business,” Stanley says. “We needed to move to a 21st-century world where everything was integrated.”

Cin7: The Agility to Adapt

Childsmart’s emerging business model included shifting to a more productive model where warehousing was outsourced to a 3PL warehouse and increasing efficiency by shifting to handling orders electronically. To do that, the company moved from spreadsheets and MYOB Exo to Cin7 and Xero in early 2018.

“Our business had changed drastically and without Cin7 and the integrations it brings with both national retailers through EDI and online channels, we probably wouldn’t have been able to do that,” Stanley says. “We’ve become a much more efficient, leaner organization, focusing our attention on the retail channels that actually were driving growth opportunities and profitability.”

As a small, family-run company, Childsmart needed integrated processes at a lower cost than other solutions. Cin7’s pricing and its integrations to Xero, 3PLs and big retailers (with built-in EDI) ticked all of Childsmart’s boxes.

“It all boils down to efficiency and productivity,” Stanley says. “Today we’re reviewing an order once. It doesn’t matter what channel it’s coming from, we review them and then push them through to our warehouse, and they pick, pack and ship the product and it all flows through the system.”

Their strategy helped Childsmart to “face the reality of market dynamics”, Stanley says. Cin7 helped make that pivot possible.

“Cin7 has enabled us to become a lean, efficient business with a much tighter range of products for a much more specific audience,” Stanley says.

Peta + Jain

“I love Cin7,” she says.

Peta + Jain are an ethical (and certified vegan) fashion company. Specializing in handbags, wallets, travel bags, belts, and jewellery, the Australia-based brand bills itself as “affordable luxury”.

Named after founders Jain Da Silva and Peta Wessell, Peta + Jain was a near-instant success, becoming one of Australia’s most popular handbag brands in under two years. After starting operations in their home workspace, Instagram and social media-fuelled growth saw them move to a new warehouse and office space in south Sydney.

Only three years later, Peta + Jain are one of the fastest-growing fashion brands in Australia, and they’re now expanding rapidly into the lucrative North American market.

But this rapid growth and international success brought new challenges. Opening up channels in new countries to online and bricks-and-mortar retailers, as well as running their own direct-to-consumer website — all while operating their own warehouse and fulfilment systems — brought Peta + Jain’s inventory processes near to breaking point. Their old system, a mix of MYOB and spreadsheets, “just didn’t cut it for inventory management,” Jennifer says.

It was time to try something new.

Hours of painful manual work replaced by Cin7

For a while, Jennifer was able to manage Peta + Jain’s inventory requirements with their existing MYOB and spreadsheet-based system.

“When we had MYOB, it was a long process. For example, we would have to key in all our orders from Iconic and Shopify, then download and upload spreadsheets into Australia Post, just to print shipping labels and other assets,” Jennifer says.

It took her and the team many hours of manual labor each week. But as the business grew, the system became more and more unsustainable. Errors became more frequent. Jennifer had a decision to make: either hire more employees to work with the existing system, or try a fresh approach.

While she did consider other ERP solutions, Jennifer knew that the cost of implementing a large system would be prohibitive and the process would be long, which is when she came across Cin7.

“Prior to that, I’d never really heard of the Cin7 system,” Jennifer says. “I looked at the functionality and noticed there’s a lot more growth and flexibility in this than there is in a high-end ERP.”

From her research, she decided to try a demo, and was immediately sold on it.

Getting integration and onboarding right the first time, in the middle of a pandemic 

Peta + Jain went live with their Cin7 implementation on January 1, 2020. Using Cin7’s Xero integration, they took care of accounting first, moving balances across from MYOB, and doing a stocktake. Then they spent a month moving slowly to make sure things were working, while simultaneously training the staff on the new system. A month later, they turned on the Shopify integration.

Then, in March, the world turned upside down.

“When the pandemic started, we had one bad month, which was April. But straight after that we were absolutely flat out as the world embraced online shopping,” Jennifer says.

“As soon as we came back from Covid, we implemented Starshipit and turned on the Iconic Marketplace integration. I’m now looking to implement barcode scanners, so we can do stocktakes easily,” she says.

“With Cin7, all our orders come in automatically. We just download and print the picking list. With Starshipit integrated, it automatically creates the consignments and prints shipping labels, which has saved hours.”

Another positive from moving to Cin7 is that company management now has access to high-quality analytics and reporting, allowing them to instantly place inventory in any of the company’s multiple channels.

“It gives us a good indication of what aged stock we have. Plus, the chart graphics are great because you can see all your sales throughout different countries. We can see what is growing and where,” Jennifer says.

Cin7 saves Peta + Jain hundreds of hours and over 130k per year

With a number of integrations now up and running seamlessly (and more planned), Jennifer says that Cin7 is now saving Peta + Jain several hours every day.

“It definitely saves time. It’s all live, it’s real time. Everything’s there to reconcile [in Xero] easily,” Jennifer says.

With future marketplace expansions and continued global growth, Jennifer says that without Cin7, the company would need one to two extra full-time employees, at minimum. Jennifer says that this was the key factor when she calculated how much money Cin7 has saved the company. She also added that when the cost of implementing traditional ERP software is taken into account, the saving is even more apparent.

“Cin7’s very well priced in the market. Other ERP systems are far more expensive, and the implementation is also more expensive. With Cin7, the onboarding costs are really low too, which is a big benefit.”

Jennifer says all these benefits combined add up to an unhesitating recommendation for other mid-market companies in the online B2B and B2C space to go with Cin7.

“I would recommend Cin7 to anyone. The flexibility of it, and the ease of integration will benefit anyone who’s in online selling, or B2B.”

Megan Salmon

Megan Salmon was exhibiting her paintings and making a name for herself but still faced a problem common to many artists.

“I had a burgeoning art career, but it really didn’t pay the bills,” Megan says. “So I needed something on the side, and I was always interested in fashion, so I kind of organically morphed into being a fashion designer and I started very small.”

Launching a fashion brand, particularly before social media, required patience. From her home in Perth, she telephoned independent retailers around Australia, then attended trade shows in Sydney and personally visited hundreds of boutiques as far away as New Zealand.

Her original designs, persistence, and word-of-mouth marketing over the next decade established Megan Salmon as a brand for women more interested in the unusual and exciting than the label.

Dispatch Days Are Hell

For years, Megan ran her business using spreadsheets. This made life unbearable every February and August, as she and her two staffers rushed to dispatch more than 7,000 units in time for the upcoming season.

“Fashion is relentless, and in my business, dispatch days are hell,” Megan says. “You have to get your products out as soon as possible because you have to give your customers as much time to sell in that season at full margin.”

Megan includes with every shipment, an unwieldy process when she came across an inevitable problem.

“It was a really clunky thing to go back and change the invoice in Excel, print it out again, then make sure the order was correct, and it would always be just a really stressful time,” Megan says.

“But now, with Cin7, if we have to make a change, we just reload the order, print it out again and it’s just a dream to change it,” Megan says. “We also email the invoice to the customer at the same time, put the paper in the box, and there’s no chasing things around anymore. It’s just all right there. It’s just brilliant.”

In fact, that was just one of the things that surprised Megan about Cin7 when she became a customer in early 2016.

Relief Comes From The Cloud

Megan used MYOB for accounting and every month, her bookkeeper would find huge discrepancies between her spreadsheets and her accounts. Because “things were not talking to each other,” Megan would spend hours with the bookkeeper to reconcile her sales.

This drove Megan to consult with Patrick Verryn of Move2Cloud, a software integrator, and Cin7 partner. With decades of accounting and technology experience, Patrick recognized how both Xero and Cin7 would help Megan improve her business.

“I get a kick out of using technology in a smart way that makes people’s lives better,” Patrick says. “I like going getting to know their business and their particular needs and I like coming up with solutions that make their lives easier with technology.”

Patrick set Megan up with Xero and Cin7 to integrate her accounting and stock management with sales processing for her B2B customers and her direct-to-consumer ecommerce channel using WooCommerce.

“I quite like working with creative people and Megan’s lighthearted and sees the humor in life and is not too serious. For me, it’s very much about the personal relationship and developing that trust so she knows I am doing the right thing for her business.”

Patrick has found the support and customer contact a key differentiator for Cin7, along with its extensive features.

“Cin7 is functionally richer than many applications and being an accountant I don’t know how someone would do that without having that knowledge that Cin7 gives to business,” he says.

Working Like a Dream

Thanks to Cin7 cloud inventory management and Move2Cloud, Megan has discovered how much easier life is now that she has that control and visibility of her inventory and sales.

“It really helps to have that inventory connected because when you go to write up an invoice, and you try to sell something you don’t really have, it tells you,” she says. “And I like the way the dashboard tells you what your biggest seller is, and I’ve just never been aware of anything like that before, it’s just been anecdotal.”

Generally speaking, Cin7 has given Megan Salmon greater efficiency, control and visibility for everything from instantly finding credit notes and invoices to, at some point soon, processing online orders using Cin7’s B2B Ecommerce module.

“Any time you do anything in Cin7, it’s instant and it’s a dream,” Megan says. “For a company my size to have this level of technology on my side, it’s just brilliant.”

New Horizon Wines

Love drew Evelyn and Allan Burns to Mauritius the first time. The couple, originally from Aberdeen Scotland, were married there in 2004. They fell head-over-heels with the island-nation.

Who could blame them? Mauritius rises from the Indian Ocean 500 miles east of Madagascar in abundant, year-round warmth and sunshine.

“It’s a beautiful tropical island and the people there are really, genuinely, very friendly,” says Evelyn. “It really captured a place in our hearts.”

The couple settled in Perth a few months later, where over the years, they cultivated another love for Australian wine. They toured vineyards, met winemakers seemingly everywhere, from the nearby Margaret River region to Tasmania, New South Wales and South Australia.

Could they combine all these loves, leave their office jobs behind, and live and work together in paradise?

Bye-Bye, Nine-to-Five

As it turns out, they could. By the time they returned to Mauritius for their tenth anniversary, Evelyn and Allan had built up an impressive personal cellar from their favorite vineyards.

“We kept going back to Mauritius for holidays and we could never find Australian wines there,” Evelyn says. “We could only find French and South African wines, so we saw an opportunity.”

That’s how the couple’s business, New Horizon Wines, began to take shape.

“We were looking for a change in lifestyle, combining a place we love with a product we love and market that in Mauritius,” Evelyn said. “We wanted to get into a better lifestyle and out of the nine-to-five thing.”

They launched New Horizon Wines in early 2016, a wine import and distribution business catering to Mauritius’ hospitality sector.

Not Just Your Garden Variety

New Horizon Wines fills a niche in a market once exclusive to European wines. About 1.2 million people visit Mauritius every year (roughly equivalent to the permanent population) offering Evelyn and Allan a steady stream of potential business, especially through the busy months from November to April.

New Horizon Wines provides wine and a small selection of spirits from Australia to 20 or so hotels, luxury resorts and restaurants.

“We’re not just selling the wine but our experience,” Evelyn says. “We wanted to sell wine that we already knew, the wines that we’ve enjoyed over the past 12 years that are in our own collection.”

Allan and Evelyn currently source products from 15 vineyards, along with a small sampling of Australian whiskeys and gin. They know the majority of the winemakers/owners personally.

“We have a personal relationship that we’re selling. It’s not ‘here’s a bunch of wines,’ it’s wines that we have a personal experience and relationship with that we want to share.”

The Perfect Landing with Landed Costs

Evelyn and Allan chose Cin7 not long after launching New Horizon Wines. Evelyn knew her way around spreadsheets, which she used to track stock at the start, but New Horizon Wines would need a more robust solution sooner or later.

“It was ok at first because the amount of inventory wasn’t very hard to manage,” Evelyn says. “But I knew that as soon as we started selling in volume, it was going to become a very manual, very time-consuming exercise to deal with stock. I’m an accountant by trade and I’ve experienced plenty of death-by-spreadsheet and I didn’t want to have to deal with that.”

Cin7’s integration with Xero and Shopify sealed the deal. And, as an importer, New Horizon Wines relies heavily on Cin7’s ability to track landed costs. New Horizon Wines uses Cin7 to manage stock in two warehouses and to process online wholesale orders with Cin7’s built-in B2B website.

The young business is also on the verge of opening a retail location, which means Evelyn and Allan will be using Cin7’s POS module, and their existing Shopify channel for online B2C sales.

Finally, Evelyn uses the perpetual inventory method with Cin7 to automatically update stock value to her Xero integration for an up-to-the-second view of the company’s bottom line.

“Cin7 is not a difficult system to pick up and learn how to use, and with all its integrations, with Shopify, with Xero, it does just make things easier,” she says.

New Horizon Wines is still a growing company, but Evelyn says that within a year or two, they plan to turn over day-to-day operations to someone else, to enjoy more of the Mauritius lifestyle they’ve dreamed of for years.

 

Playtech

Paul Kao describes Playtech as a typical family-run New Zealand small business. His parents launched the company under another form in 1993, a PC and component distributor and wholesaler.

Over the years, however, technology got cheaper and cheaper, and PCs became commodities. By the time Paul was ready to take over the business, he knew things needed to change.

“The distribution wholesale market started getting squeezed,” Paul says. “We really wanted to become a direct-to-consumer business, using our knowledge and our existing relationships with vendors to bring technology to New Zealand more cost-effectively and to make it more fun for the customers.”

By 2007, Paul had successfully pivoted Playtech to become a multichannel company with a heavy emphasis on custom PC builds, an experiential boutique store, and a robust ecommerce channel that could handle the bulk of their transactions.

A Neighborhood Store With National Reach

The transition from pure wholesale didn’t happen overnight.

“We wanted our business to run as much online as we could make it,” Paul says. “We also wanted our store to be a boutique, where walk-ins and loyal customers could both come and have a great customer experience.”

Through its “pedigree and word-of-mouth” growth, Playtech gained a reputation for being a “cool neighborhood store that knows how to build PCs,” Paul says. They started to sell everything from gadgets, keyboards, tablets to kitted-out PCs for their “bread-and-butter” market: PC gamers.

Today, Playtech does the majority of its business online, selling to both individuals and some retailers everywhere in New Zealand through its Magento-based online store.

Old Inventory Management Couldn’t Cut It

Paul soon discovered that Playtech’s inventory management software, Exchequer Enterprise, was severely inadequate to the new business model.

The company manages thousands of products in its warehouse. It had to track those products from supplier to customer (and sometimes back again for returns). Finally, Playtech had to create price quotes for custom PC builds based on variable components.

Exchequer made this very difficult. First, it was geared to wholesale and bulk distribution, not retail. More critically, it required Playtech to create a code number for every product in its inventory and to use those codes for everything from stock intake to product searches, instead of using product serial numbers.

“It was just a beast to run reports, to understand where a product came from and who we sold it to how it came back into the system if there was a return,” Paul says. “It just wasn’t fit for the model and it had some major issues that caused it to crash badly a lot.”

Going with Cin7 Inventory Control

Playtech was Cin7’s first client and a key collaborator in the development of its core modules. Playtech had worked with Danny Ing’s web development business before, so when Danny launched Cin7, Paul seized the opportunity to switch solutions.

“The biggest kicker for us was Cin7’s support for serial number tracking of every item and it was a God-send,” Paul says. “We can pick up an item, scan the serial number, and know everything we need to know about that product: where it came from, how much it cost, if it was sold or returned. The serial number holds that whole paper trail.”

Benefits of Cin7 for Inventory Management

Playtech today uses Cin7’s inventory management software to pick orders in the warehouse, price and kit-out custom PCs, process sales in its store and through its integrated Magento ecommerce website, and sell at tech and gaming expos all with a dramatically reduced amount of administration and data entry.

For example, prior to Cin7, a stocktake required Playtech to shut down its warehouse for a day as staff members walked through the shelves with reams of paper printouts. Using  Cin7’s Pick’n’Pack module, the process is much easier, quicker and leads to no operational downtime.

“We don’t have to print out a whole stack of papers now and say go and find this item on the shelf and hopefully it’s there,” Paul says. “Now we just go through the shelf, scan every item, and the system tells us if we have extra of one thing or if we’re missing something else. Now we just do a stocktake on-the-fly.”

Cin7’s level of inventory control is crucial to keep costs down in an industry in which a business makes $20 on a $1,000 item. Cin7 helped Playtech reduce costs, lower inventory shrinkage, and increase the bottom line.

“The key thing is that we are now very clear about where our inventory items sit,” Paul says. “It’s much easier to utilize than any other inventory system that we’ve seen. And because it’s in the cloud, we’re no longer tied to an umbilical cord to a software server. We can do our business on the road and still have full visibility no matter where we are.”

ONEBYONE

Matt Newman was a graphic designer with a passion for printmaking when he “kind of just fell into” the fashion trade in 2008.

“I had a lot of good friends who were paid extreme sports athletes getting sponsorship,” Matt says. “I started making clothes for them, and they would be seen wearing it. That’s how it started.”

Surfing and wakeboarding athletes and fans quickly took notice of Matt’s custom-designed board shorts and T-shirts. Matt saw the potential of marrying his design passion with a new fashion brand, ONEBYONE.

From board shorts to a broader market

But Matt didn’t limit himself to sportswear. ONEBYONE soon developed a broad casual streetwear line with a fresh, distinct style governing each season’s release.

The brand’s early focus on brick-and-mortar and beach-side pop-up retail helped establish and build a brand reputation for quality clothes and timeless design.

“There are people that are still wearing a shirt from six years ago, and it’s still holding together,” Matt says. “That’s pretty cool: we’ve made something that the quality is good enough and the fashion current enough that they’re still comfortable wearing it.”

Messy processes, lost customers

ONEBYONE runs its own warehouse, and the way his small team managed orders and stock for their pop-ups, website and wholesale channels created serious issues, especially when they began selling on The Iconic marketplace.

“We managed all our stock using spreadsheets, and it was pretty messy,” Matt says. “We had orders being picked for retail partners, orders being picked for our pop-ups, and stock in the warehouse, and it was hard to know what stock there really was in the warehouse.”

Spreadsheets didn’t give them the real-time visibility and control they needed to keep up with their growth. They sometimes double-sold an item because they didn’t know they’d received orders from different channels for the same product. And that cost ONEBYONE customers.

“We definitely would have lost some customers along the way from not having stock,” Matt says. “They would have thought, ‘Well, I’m probably not going to buy from them again because they didn’t have it the first time.’”

Matt needed a better way to manage his business.

“Our system just wasn’t going to be sustainable for our growth,” he says. “Spending time updating spreadsheets, sorting out where our stock was: it was costing us a ton of time and money to do that.”

Cin7 Puts ONEBYONE on track for growth

ONEBYONE began using Cin7 in 2017. Its real-time stock visibility, integrated WooCommerce and The Iconic order processing, warehouse functionality and reporting give Matt the data he needs to efficiently manage stock and orders and eliminate double-selling.

“It talks to our website, talks to The Iconic, and that means the job of updating the quantities has been reduced a lot,” Matt says. “We don’t spend as much time worrying about where our stock is. Cin7 has helped our business to be streamlined and accountable.”

Matt and his team have also gone through a complete barcode labeling process that will let them do more pop-ups and run future warehouse sales.

“Now, if anyone was to purchase from our warehouse or a future pop up store, all we have to do is scan it,” Matt says.

And with Cin7’s reports, Matt has quick access to vital data about current stock.

“With the reports section, I can see what is selling, know what we’re running low of, all at a couple clicks of the button,” Matt says. “We could always get it from spreadsheets, but it wasn’t transparent, so Cin7 has saved us time every day.”

And Cin7 helps set the stage for future growth.

“The platform has made us feel comfortable enough to launch a sister brand and to set that up from the start with the right costs, the right landed costs, and to have it integrated right away with The Iconic.”