Agiliron 7.7 Connects Retailers with QuickBooks Online

Agiliron, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider (that you pronounce “agile iron”), has launched version 7.7 of the company’s platform, marking the first time that the product links with QuickBooks Online.

The latest version closes the loop for small and midsized retailers that want to keep their financial affairs in order on Intuit’s cloud, according to Stan Roach, chief revenue officer of Agiliron. QuickBooks Online is the cloud-based version of Inuit’s venerable accounting software that helps small business track and manage their finances without making big upfront investments in hardware and software. An App Center provides expandability, allowing customers to tailor the product’s capabilities to their needs.

Improving the QuickBooks Online Experience

However, said Roach, QuickBooks online lacked a way for retailers to capitalize on the platform’s extensibility. “QuickBooks Online was mainly sold to the service sector,” said Roach. Retailers and business-to-business (B2B) vendors were left to their own devices, by and large.

“It didn’t have an order and inventory tracking system,” said Roach. That gap in functionality can make it challenging for small and midsized ecommerce and brick-and-mortar-based companies to coordinate the multi-channel sales and accounting sides of their businesses.

Agiliron 7.7 bridges that gap, according to Roach.

The solution allows QuickBooks Online customers—the SaaS-based product is also compatible with on-premises QuickBooks installations—to manage their online sales channels, point-of-sale transactions, customers and inventory. Agiliron syncs with Intuit’s platform to provide users with a real-time view of how their sales activities affect their bottom line.

The company’s technology does more than account for every piece of inventory and properly record and process every sale. It opens up new sales channels that can help grow a small or midsized business, asserted Roach.

“Amazon did $24 billion in sales with third-party merchants last year,” said Roach. Agiliron’s software consolidates the management of online marketplaces and coordinates inventory, letting SMBs stretch into new markets and efficiently sell across multiple channels.

“Amazon and eBay have their own admin panel,” reminded Roach. In general, small businesses owners have better ways of spending their time than managing both—or more if they plan to reach more customers. Yet, merchants won’t get far unless they make a move into “all the places where people by product,” he said. Agiliron represents “easy found money with a platform that helps you to go those places.”

Agiliron’s philosophy is best encapsulated by the company’s tagline, said Roach. “Sell more in more places, but manage in one.” It’s a sentiment shared by Agiliron’s CEO, Satish Menon.

“Offering the flexibility and scalability to sell products in multiple places, yet manage in one, requires an integrated suite of functionality built around a unified data model,” he said in a statement. It’s a concept that, while complex in execution, yields “simple results for our customers—more revenue that’s easier to manage,” he added.

Ronny Tey, group marketing manager for QuickBooks Apps said in a written statement that the integration “is all about giving retailers, wholesalers, light manufacturers and other product-selling businesses the ability to sell their products across multiple channels through the Agiliron Suite while seamlessly syncing their data in QuickBooks Online.”

Roach sees this as another step in small business IT’s eventual (and inevitable) move to cloud.

The days of pricey software and big server expenditures are over. What’s more, cloud services offer SMBs advanced capabilities that were once reserved for large enterprises. “The old distaste for IT is going to gradually shift as SaaS provides headache-free IT,” he said. “SaaS is going to be their best new friend.”

Pedro Hernandez is a contributing editor at Small Business Computing. Follow him on Twitter @ecoINSITE.

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