Many manufacturers begin their journey with QuickBooks Online. The cloud-based accounting software that tracks your finances and manages your inventory — a two-birds-one-stone solution to their problems.

It’s when the sales start flooding in do the problems rear their head. As good as QuickBooks Online is, there are limitations to be found, especially for manufacturers who need to track their inventory. Thankfully, there are third-party apps that can help you implement a QuickBooks barcode inventory.

This article will look at how to implement a QuickBooks barcode inventory management software, why they’re important, and the benefits.

Getting started with QuickBooks barcode inventory

We won’t overload you with the intricate details of how barcode scanning works. If you’re eager to learn, check out our ultimate guide to barcode inventory control for manufacturers.

But it needs to be explained that QuickBooks comes in two versions:

• QuickBooks Desktop (Pro, Premier, or Enterprise)
• QuickBooks Online

And both can be broken down into different packages and payment plans.

We mention this because currently, you cannot use QuickBooks barcode inventory with the online version. If you’re already a QBO user, don’t close the page just yet, as we do have workarounds for navigating the missing feature.

With QuickBooks Desktop, you’ll get access to an in-built add-on called Advanced Inventory which will allow you to implement:

• QuickBooks barcode inventory
• Order management software
• Warehouse management
• Accounting and finance tracking

When looking into how to work with barcode and QuickBooks, imagine you’re a large-scale manufacturer who prints unique artwork of several collaborating artists on t-shirts. You need to track inventory like raw material, WIP inventory, and finished goods.

QuickBooks barcode software easily allows you to track these items as they move along your shopfloor and warehouses in real-time, allowing you to keep all your inventory information centralized, removing the chance for human errors to occur.

To do this with QuickBooks Desktop, log in to your QuickBooks account, and follow these steps:

1. At the top of the dashboard, find Edit and select it.
2. From the drop-down menu, select Preferences… to continue.
3. A new window will open where you can customize various aspects of your business. Here you will find a tab called Company Preferences which you will need to select.
4. Once here, go ahead and check the box to Enable my barcode scanner.

Once you have set it up, you can go ahead and use QuickBooks Desktop barcode software for invoices, sales receipts, purchase orders, and inventory reports.

Check out this video published by QuickBooks if you want a visual but brief breakdown of how QuickBooks barcode inventory works.

Here’s an overview of the importance and benefits of using QuickBooks barcode inventory systems within your manufacturing business.

Understanding the importance of using QuickBooks barcode management

QuickBooks barcode management will allow you to handle a lot of aspects of your business, and in some industries, a barcode management system is imperative, like for those managing perishable inventories and working in food production.

Having barcodes in place allows you to reduce human errors, improve inventory management discipline, and easily track products along your supply chain. Here is a list of other reasons why having a barcode inventory system QuickBooks is essential for manufacturers.

1. Improve your infrastructure

Getting yourself a QuickBooks barcode inventory system will allow you to not only manage your inventory better but give you tools like:

• QuickBooks barcode generator
• Barcode printing functionalities
• Features to use scanners to decode barcodes
• A centralized platform for storing decoded barcode data

2. Locate problems in your supply chain

Having QuickBooks barcode management allows you to find areas along your manufacturing route that affect your business, like bottlenecks forming along your production line. You can achieve this by having information collected and stored from using a barcode system to analyze at any point along your routes to identify problems and make improvements.

3. Easily perform audits

No one likes doing them, but they have to be done. Otherwise, your inventory will run wild, and your business will hemorrhage money.

If audits are an unavoidable task, which do you think would be easier, counting and updating your inventory levels by hand? Or, pointing your scanner, clicking, and inventory levels updating automatically and in real-time?

4. Distinguish your products

Having all your SKU variants set up is one thing, but having a barcode means you can store as much information as you need within the barcode so you can easily find and differentiate your products, perfect for manufacturers who sell dozens of variants of multiple products.

5. Print and label your inventory

Finally, once you have your QuickBooks barcode inventory system configured, you can go ahead and start printing those barcodes and go on a labeling rampage. Theoretically, you don’t have to wait to set up a system. If you’re in the process of trying to find barcode software, you can, in the meantime, already make your barcodes with a QuickBooks barcode generator.

7 benefits of using QuickBooks barcode inventory in your manufacturing

Now you know the importance of having a QuickBooks barcode inventory, let’s look into the benefits you can quickly reap once you’ve set it up for your business.

1. Reduces the possibility of human error

Manually updating inventory levels, especially when using inefficient Excel spreadsheets, leaves you with an ample amount of opportunity to make mistakes that will cost you and your business. With a QuickBooks barcode inventory system, all you have to do is point and click to update inventory.

2. Reduces employee training time

With barcodes in place, every time someone new joins you don’t have to teach them about your pricing procedures or even the ins and outs of your inventory management. Hand them the scanner, teach them how to use it, and everyone will be well on their way.

3. Inexpensive to design and print

This mainly applies after the purchasing of equipment, paper, and ink, etc. But, once you have the means, designing and printing your QuickBooks barcodes, the costs will be minimal.

4. Extremely versatile

Why do you need QuickBooks barcodes? Is it for For tracking inventory? Price? Lot or batch tracking? Barcodes can be printed on any surface and contain whatever information you need to be stored.

5. Improved control management

We’ve briefly touched on improved inventory management throughout the article. But we haven’t mentioned that you can also track assets with a QuickBooks barcode scanning system. This means if items travel back and forth between locations, it’s easier to find said items.

6. Improved analytics

Have rapidly available data stored in a centralized platform and customize barcodes to display everything you need to get an overview of your inventory movements in real-time.

7. Better decision making in your business

Finally, having all this information readily available allows you to make better business decisions, saving you time and money in the long run.

That’s everything you need to know about QuickBooks barcode inventory. But, as mentioned earlier in the article. What about manufacturers using QuickBooks Online?

QuickBooks Online users can also access barcodes, but they will need to look for a third-party integration to help them achieve this.

Using QuickBooks barcodes with the Online version

QuickBooks themselves advise online users to head over to the Intuit Developers Forum, which has developers and coders who help each other out when it comes to development, integrations, and programming for creating bespoke solutions.

Like any other forum, you submit a question following the on-screen instructions, and others in the community will reach out to you, providing solutions for implementing QuickBooks barcode inventory.

However, suppose you’re a manufacturer using QuickBooks Online for managing your business and don’t have the time or experience to develop integrations alongside other developers. In that case, you can use comparison sites such as Software Advice or Capterra to find third-party software with QuickBooks barcode managing features already built in.

But, let us help you get started on this journey to finding the perfect tool for implementing a QuickBooks barcode inventory system.

How to work with barcodes and QuickBooks with Katana

Katana manufacturing ERP is an online platform for manufacturers looking to automate workflows, from sales to manufacturing to the shop floor and between warehouses, helping you manage your entire workflow in one place.

Katana comes equipped with a barcode scanning inventory system, perfect for those who need real-time functionality for:

• Tracking finished goods and material availability
• Storing bill of materials (product recipes)
• Priority-based production planning
• Multichannel sales support
• Shop floor level control

To get access to all this, you probably think that you need to jump through a ton of hoops? Wrong. To get started with Katana and QuickBooks barcode inventory, all you need to do is follow these steps three simple steps:

Step 1

Log into Katana with our 14-day free trial to begin.

Step 2

At the top of the Dashboard, select Settings and click the Integrations tab. Once there, choose QuickBooks, and configure how the two platforms will sync.

Step 3

Once you’ve finished that, click continue, and that’s it! You can now manage your entire business here, and once again, in Settings you can enable barcodes to include QuickBooks barcode scanning too.

If you want to learn more about how to set up barcode scanning with Katana, be sure to check out the video below: