You could spend $150,000 on accounting software, but it wouldn’t help your wholesale business any more than spending only $5,000-$15,000 on Oak Street. This would seem hard to believe until you actually learned that Oak Street is comparable to high-cost packages in terms of the time and effort required for: order entry, creating invoices, selecting orders for shipment, U.P.S. and FedEx processing, reordering merchandise, receiving-in merchandise, processing credit cards, warehouse management, sales analysis, sales commissions, customer service tasks, posting checks, EDI, credit checks, collections, barcode printing, order fulfillment, and many other tasks.
How can Oak Street be so affordably priced? It was small wholesalers who predominantly sought the services of Industrious Software early on, meaning the cost of the software had to be small too. As the user-base grew to include medium-sized wholesalers, the tradition of keeping the cost low has been maintained. A few things factor into why Oak Street can continue to be offered at such low cost today:
- No middlemen get involved in selling it
- As opposed to receiving the training through a ‘dealer’ who has a strong incentive to pile-on the training (because most of the dealer’s profit comes from training), the training is provided directly by Industrious Software (the developer), where the cost is fixed
- Most implementations do not require training to be performed on-site (although if necessary, on-site training can be provided.) The training is provided predominantly via “remote connection software” so that all of Oak Street functions and features can be demonstrated to the system operators as they watch their own monitor, thus avoiding the expenses involved with travel
In addition to low cost, ease of use is another advantage offered by Oak Street. Admittedly, QuickBooks© pioneered the clever idea of making data entry screens resemble their paper equivalent. The benefit of that to the user was obvious, and so Oak Street emulates that feature. Now, for example, Oak Street’s invoice screens are formatted like an actual invoice. This user-friendly interface is but one example of how Oak Street sets itself apart from the host of mid-range packages.
Good business software should comprehensively and deeply tackle whichever area of business it addresses. The “Industrious” in the name Industrious Software signifies the commitment to achieving that goal. Providing wholesalers with a solution that far exceeds the simple functionality offered by typical business software is Industrious Software’s primary objective.
For instance, when it comes to setting prices (for inventory items), Oak Street doesn’t just provide for a price based on customer levels (wholesale, distributor, retail, etc.). Instead, the Oak Street user has TWENTY different choices as to how a price might be assigned (e.g., you might want the price to be based on the total quantity ordered for a group of items).
The same holds true for sales rep commissions. Besides just setting a commission rate per sales rep, the Oak Street user has a variety of choices. Just one of the multitudes of options is to specify that commission rates are dependent upon the price that each individual item gets sold for.
Oak Street’s Suggested Reorder Report can provide you with suggestions as to how many of each item you should be reordering…and by what date. The Suggested Reorder Report doesn’t merely base its forecasting on raw sales numbers. Instead, it takes into account TWENTY different factors when it produces a report. (As a side note, you can tell it to ignore exceptionally large ‘one-time’ orders that would inappropriately skew a reorder recommendation).
As for U.P.S. and FedEx shipping services, Oak Street is not limited to linking to those in just one way. Instead, Oak Street offers several different approaches that enable you to connect with those shipping manifest systems based on the way you operate. For example, there are different links depending upon whether you invoice before or after you ship, and different links depending upon whether your products have predefined weights/boxes or not.
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