Company: ECOlunchbox®
Location: Lafayette, Calif.
QuickBooks Benefits:
• Helps company grow exponentially with greater efficiency in the office.
• Reduces time spent entering financial data with automated imports.
• Provides analysis for strategizing on sales and marketing, such as forecasting.
• Enables multiple team players in various locations to work off the same file in multi-user function.
• Supports capability to export to Excel allows for financial analysis in parallel software programs.
When eco mom Sandra Harris saw how much trash was generated at lunchtime and the excessive amount of plastics used, she knew it was time to do something to solve this problem. She realized that lunch waste was a burden to our planet and a health threat to our children.
Plastics are made from petroleum – and they often contain unhealthy toxins like BPA and other chemicals. Four years later, this seed of an idea has grown into a thriving eco-friendly lunchware business managed by operations director Faryn Davis and several other team members.
ECOlunchbox® specializes in providing reusable stainless steel bento boxes, plastic-free food containers, artisan lunchbags, napkins and other waste-free lunch accessories.
With several part-time team members working both in-house as well as remotely, growing cloud technology and efficient Intuit software plays a big part in successfully managing the company while keeping overhead to a bare minimum.
Easy to Launch with QuickBooks
In order to bring Sandra’s vision from dream to reality, ECOlunchbox’s management team knew from the beginning it needed a user-friendly accounting system and its first choice was QuickBooks.
“QuickBooks is a very user-friendly application,” said Faryn Davis, who is the director of operations for ECOlunchbox. “I had learned to use the software assisting my mother in her small business while I was in high school.”
The company designs products at their headquarters in Lafayette, California in the San Francisco East Bay and works with artisan manufacturers in India and Thailand.
“Now that the business is growing, we keep track of all our customers, their payment status, vendor payments, manufacturers, and associated purchase orders in QuickBooks Pro,” she said. “It’s very user friendly for me to use as well as the owner who did not previously have experience with bookkeeping software systems.”
Green Company Tracks Greenbacks
Going green is obviously a top priority for a company like ECOlunchbox specializing in eco-friendly products. But managing the bottom line – green, like money! – is even more important in order for the company to optimize cash flow and maintain stock levels of their popular products.
It’s been hard for the boot-strapping company to keep up with demand its products, especially during back to school and other peak shopping periods. But with the tools available in QuickBooks, Faryn says managing the business has been a piece of cake.
“I use multiple reports in QuickBooks to forecast our production needs for the next 12 months,” she said. “The ‘Sales by Item’ report is the tool I use most to plan our orders.”
Faryn finds the electronic records in QuickBooks also makes calculations easier, especially for reviewing purchase orders.
“We email our purchase orders to our suppliers directly from Quickbooks,” she said. “It’s very easy to go through old ones to log payments applied, check when we’ll be receiving shipments and calculate lead manufacturing times on different products.”
A Flexible Management System
At one point, their number one seller, the ECOlunchbox > Three-in-One stainless steel bento box, was so popular that they had customers on a waiting list. Faryn used QuickBooks to make sure she could minimize their wait time and maximize organization.
“I can easily see in QuickBooks who ordered what first, that way I can make sure people are getting served on a first-come, first-served basis,” she explained. “I can hold on to items to make sure that people on backorder get them first while I continue to place orders for future shipments.”
If there are any changes in the orders that arrive, Faryn makes quick work of them by easily correcting errors.
“Our fulfillment center receives the goods, counts them, then lets me know if there were any discrepancies,” she said. “It’s very easy for me to go into QuickBooks and modify the purchase order to the correct amount if I need to. I never have to worry that our payments don’t match up to what we received.”
Automated Imports Save Time
For online sales, the small business relies on Yahoo Small Business Merchant to ensure a secure, user-friendly online shopping experience for their customers.
“Yahoo Merchant takes care of credit card processing, and holds our item information on our website,” she said. “We export all the order information into an Excel spreadsheet then import that spreadsheet into QuickBooks to update the sales information.”
The automatic import of information is a huge time saver for the company.
“All those items are automatically broken out by item number and customer names are merged with past orders, which makes my job so much easier,” she said. “If I had to go in and input every single order myself it would take me a week.”
More Strategy, Less Tedious Manual Labor
QuickBooks also helps Faryn analyze current sales patterns, so they know the best place to put future sales and marketing efforts.
“I created categories to track the different types of customers we have, whether they are wholesale, retail, e-tail, international, even type of store,” she said. “I check our Profit and Loss report and the Balance Sheet to see how many orders are coming in through each customer type.”
“We look at those to help us know where we should be putting our efforts next – maybe more direct-to-consumer, international e-tailers, or certain types of wholesalers. It’s really helped us as we develop our sales and marketing strategies,” she said. “I’m just so grateful we can depend on QuickBooks to grow with us every step of the way!”
