Case studies
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CLIENT:
“Charlipop Kids World”
What used to take at least 6 hours at the end of every week now takes less than 15 minutes.
The Background
Core business for the client is selling new and used children’s clothing online.
The Problem
As customers place orders for children's clothing online, the shopping cart software that Charlipop Kids use keeps track of everything to do with the order. It records all the customer information, product details, order dates and dollar amounts as well as payment details. At the end of every week, these orders are printed out of the shopping cart system, one by one, and then manually entered as invoices into the client's Quickbooks system – again, one by one. This is a time consuming process that, as the company was growing, was taking more and more time to complete. Sometimes, this process was just "put on hold" while day to day business was taken care of, and then a frantic "catch-up" period happened nearing the end of each quarter when the BAS was due! While this was something the owner of the company used to do herself, she had become reliant on paying an hourly rate to a book-keeper to handle this instead.
It is important to note that this problem was not a problem at all when Charlipop Kids World were a young, small company. The amount of orders processed online per day were minimal in the beginning, but popularity of the product meant that soon over 100 orders per day were being received. Remember – each of these then had to be manually entered in Quickbooks.
The DataHouse Solution
DataHouse immediately saw what was possible with a customised software solution for Charlipop Kids World. Since all the information that needed to be entered for the invoice was already being entered into the shopping cart system, there was an obvious double-handling situation that needed rectifying.
With their customers effectively becoming the data entry operators as they purchased online, Charlipop Kids World were able to elimate the need for manually entering their invoices into Quickbooks. The shopping cart had an export function which took the orders and put all the information relating to them into an XML file. Datahouse built a custom system that imported this XML file, gathered what data they needed to produce the invoice and then created an IIF Transaction File that is able to imported directly into Quickbooks.
