QuickBooks offers users of its Enterprise Edition functionality known as Advanced Inventory. This functionality allows for the creation of multiple ‘sites’ and creation of multiple ‘locations’ within each site; which can also be thought of as ‘warehouse/bin’ designations. Inventory may then be distributed amongst the individual storage locations, thus supporting more precise availability in the order taking and fulfillment processes.

The process indicated above flow naturally when an order is originated via the QuickBooks user interface, given that the person taking the order manually selects the desired stock location. A gap, however, exists when eCommerce orders are imported into QuickBooks via 3rd party integrations. Given that the QuickBooks SDK (Software Development Kit) does not expose the default storage location for each item, the most popular integrations, at best, have been limited to importing just a default ‘site’, thereby leaving a significant amount of manual adjustment to enable an efficient pick-list. Using extensive business logic, CartSpan has overcome this limitation to reference an appropriate stock ‘location’ at the time of import. This logic also accounts for items that may have two (or more) storage locations and can be configured to ignore locations that might be designated as ‘Quarantine.’

Seemingly small features such as these can greatly improve the operational efficiency of an organization, especially when order line-item counts are high.