QuickBooks Online offers some inventory management features that small businesses can use to handle basic logistical requirements. It should be noted that not every version of the online accounting solution includes the same number of inventory tools – or any, for that matter.
There are three versions of QuickBooks Online: Simple Start, Essentials, and Plus. QuickBooks Online Simple Start costs $20 per month, and it only offers accounting features, such as creating invoices, tracking income and expenses, and printing checks. That is perfectly reasonable because it is first and foremost an accounting solution. The two more advanced versions of QuickBooks Online branch out and offer several inventory management features, so we will focus our discussion on them.
QuickBooks Online Essentials
QuickBooks Online Essentials costs $35 per month, and it offers two helpful inventory management features:
- The ability to manage multiple vendors and pay bills received from them
- The ability to create multiple currencies and use them in transactions
As noted above, these features are quite basic. But that makes sense because this is not the most advanced version of the accounting software. That comes next in the form of QuickBooks Online Plus, and it includes many other inventory management capabilities in addition to the ones mentioned here.
QuickBooks Online Plus
QuickBooks Online Plus costs $60 per month, and it adds the following inventory management features to the ones that are already in the QuickBooks Online Essentials version:
- Track inventory items and quantities
- Make automatic updates to inventory quantities
- Sort items by their taxable and nontaxable status
- Generate purchase orders and send them out to vendors
- Track each of your location’s total number of sales and level of profitability
- Set up stock alerts to let you know the appropriate time to order more items to replenish your stock
Compare this list to the two Boxstorm versions. We’ll go through them and see how they stack up to the QuickBooks Online inventory options.
Boxstorm Free
Boxstorm Free is the first free online inventory solution to integrate with QuickBooks Online. There is no QuickBooks Online version that is entirely free of cost, but Boxstorm Free will never require any payment information or credit card number to access its expansive feature set.
Boxstorm Free allows you to create inventory items, monitor their quantities, set up locations, and do many other things that are beyond the reach of even QuickBooks Online Plus, such as scanning items in and out with a barcode scanner. Here is the full list of features you will find in this Boxstorm version:
- Create items
- Import/Export data
- Scan in and out
- Add/Remove inventory
- Move inventory
- Cycle count
- QuickBooks Online integration
- Units of measure
- Locations
- Audit trail
- iOS app
- Android app
For a free online inventory solution, Boxstorm Free sure is packed with features. And every other Boxstorm version includes all of these features, as well as many others.
Boxstorm Pro
Boxstorm Pro costs $79 per month, just shy of the cost of the most advanced version of QuickBooks Online. It completes the feature set of all of the previous versions of the online inventory solution by adding automatic reorder points, stock alerts, default vendors, and other key features:
- Auto ordering
- Stripe payment processing
- Item-based unit of measure conversions
- Stock alerts
- Default vendors
- API access
- User permissions
QuickBooks Online Inventory
It is entirely logical for QuickBooks Online to excel in the realm of accounting while not offering an expansive inventory management feature set. Its area of expertise is on the accounting side, so there is no reason to expect it to do everything flawlessly. It offers a number of helpful inventory management features to give small businesses a start in this part of their operations. And then it integrates with other Web-based business solutions, such as Boxstorm, to handle other important tasks.
Sign up for a free account with Boxstorm Free to see how well it works with QuickBooks Online to add even more inventory management tools to your arsenal.
TL;DR SUMMARY
QuickBooks Online offers vendor management, multi-currency, inventory tracking, auto updates to quantities, taxes, purchase orders, sales tracking, and stock alerts. Boxstorm Pro offers item creation, data import/export, scanning in and out, quantity modification, inventory moves, cycle counts, QuickBooks Online integration, unit of measure conversions, default locations, sub-locations, audit trail, sales orders and reports, taxes, sales reps, customer management, item categories, purchase orders and reports, payments, lot/batch number tracking, expiration date tracking, vendor management, auto reordering, stock alerts, Stripe integration, API access, and user permissions.