Your Long-Term Inventory Partner

Whenever you need to store inventory in multiple locations or assemble products (e.g. bill of materials) you definitely graduate to needing a full inventory system.

Xero does not have those two features, and whilst it can be useful for simple setups, Cin7 provides a lot more functionality.

Another helpful feature is that you can receive stock into the system before receiving supplier invoices, or vice versa, which often happens in the real day-to-day of a business using stock.

When approving a purchase in Xero, it treats both of these as done (invoice received + stock on hand increased). However, in Cin7 you can choose ‘Stock first’ or ‘Invoice first’ to match the business flow.

Implementing Cin7 can take a couple of weeks (for a new business, with minimal inventory or historical complexity) to 2-3 months for an established company (where we clean up SKUs, review and update stock processes and enhance management reporting).

We always start with an analysis phase in our projects, which informs how much there is to do and how long it will take. This way, the implementation and training time is also spent effectively to get you up and running on a well-set-up Cin7 platform as soon as possible.

Cin7 has a range of integrations, and they follow the best practice we’ve seen.

The integrations are logical and well-documented, and there are error queues that are useful to resolve issues.

For example if a transaction in Shopify is still pending processing in Cin7, or if a transaction in Cin7 could not sync to Xero, you can find these on the queues, which is very helpful in resolving them.

You do need to monitor the queues, as there may be good reasons transactions don’t sync (trying to change transactions in a locked period, or altering a paid off invoice, for example). All of this is part of the monthly process in running an up to date inventory and accounting system (which we can help with!)

It’s a great question, and one that addresses the heart of what it takes to manage inventory exceptionally.

Cin7’s monthly subscription cost should bring substantial efficiency to the team, as that is where the bulk of the ‘cost of ownership’ sits, but to get the best out of an inventory system, your team needs to feed it with data:

• Stock received quantities – do they match the supplier invoice, or did they short send?
• Assigning stock to sales: Picking and packing stock needs to be done accurately, especially if you have serialised or batch products.
• Performing stock counts – identifying any stock that has moved in or out without your knowledge.

This definitely takes time and effort, and some of these processes may need to be improved or done more diligently than at present to get the results you are looking for.

We’re here to help with this and do an upfront exercise of mapping out what each team member is required to do in the system. This will help you gain clarity on the true total resource cost of exceptional inventory management.