App of the Month: Unleashed

Each month at Withers Tsang we take a look at the various applications and digital programs designed to help your business thrive.

This month we’re continuing our inventory management series with Unleashed.

Unleashed software offers enterprise-level business management solutions for manufacturers, wholesalers and distributors.

Like most inventory management software, Unleashed is cloud-based, so it offers up-to-date and real-time data on your inventory. Unleashed provides serial number tracking, supports barcode scanning, and sends low stock reminders to simplify the reordering process. You also have the option of cloning old purchase and sales orders to save time creating new ones, and you can assign different permissions to each of your users on the dashboard.

Key Features:

Manufacturing

Unleashed enables third-party assembly cost tracking, giving you the option to add this cost under your product costs to provide a more accurate Cost of Goods Sold. You can also add pre-used components from your unsold goods back into your stock on hand, which gives you more flexibility to use the materials you have in stock.

Unleashed is a good software for businesses working with food production. You can create a bill of materials that doubles as a recipe for any edible goods. You can also track your inventory by batch number to help you keep track of each item’s sell by date.

Sales

Unleashed allows you to use integrations to sell your products on multiple sales channels. Some popular integrations include Shopify inventory management, Vend Inventory, Salesforce inventory management, Amazon and Magento.

Another key feature is the built-in B2B eCommerce portal. This allows you to sell item on multiple platforms with multiple price points. Your wholesale customers have the option to login on your portal. Using their login, they can access and view your wholesale products and place an order directly on the portal. They can even create lists of their favourite items to simplify and speed up the process of reordering, and view their order status from their account.

On the Unleashed platform you have the option of assigning your customers to specific sales agents, as well as setting up special pricing and discounts for that customer. Using this feature, your sales agent will be able to show the customer the exact price they would pay for a particular item.

Business Intelligence Tool

Since Unleashed is cloud-base, the data presented on each dashboard is up-to-date and accurate, giving you a transparent view into your business at any time. You can analyse your business’s performance through insightful reports, including the price margin report (to see whether the product or line is making enough profit) and the reorder report (which shows your stock position).

Unleashed allows you to see all KPIs that track your business performance across your customers, inventory, sales, purchases and production.

• The sales dashboard allows you to see your sales revenue, gross profit and sales order, and you can even apply filters to see which channels, sales people and regions are hitting their targets.

• On the inventory dashboard, you can identify which products are popular and which are slow selling by filtering by stock age. You can also view the percentage of the stock sold per annum, and can zoom in on the details or download relevant spreadsheets to dig deeper.

• The production dashboard shows you how much wastage exists for a particular product, and lets you look deeper into your purchases to determine what percentage of costs are shipping fees.

Each dashboard helps answer your business questions and enables you make improvements in areas that are lacking. The dashboard overview provides you with adequate information that assists in decision making.

B2B eCommerce Store

Unleashed offers a B2B eCommerce Store, which is an online ordering platform designed to speed up the buy and sell process and minimise costs. This option is available on all plans, however it comes with an additional cost. The B2B premium option is an additional $119 a month or $1,308 annually. This plan gives you one store with the ability to list 500 products and have 250 customers. If you require more stores, you can upgrade to B2B premium plus which will give you the option to have up to ten stores with unlimited products and customers.

Note: unlimited products and customers are subject to fair and reasonable use.

Mobile App

The Unleashed mobile app is designed to support your sales team. It gives your sales agents real-time visibility of your stock levels across all locations, so that they can accurately estimate fulfilment times on the spot while talking to customers. Once they log in, the app opens to a sales dashboard which contains an overview of sales orders, sales in draft, what’s been parked/placed, and what’s been backordered for each sales team member.

The app stores all your customer details, order history and up-to-date product information. You can also call the customer directly from the app. Each sales team member has access to the data of the customer/s they’re assigned to – including their purchase history. They can create a new sales order or negotiate a reorder based on this purchase history.

The Unleashed mobile app also works offline, so you can create, edit and save sales orders on your phone in offline mode then sync with your Unleashed software once you’re back online. The app also lets you access the special pricing and discount information that was set up for specific customers, as well as quantity discounts and global pricing information.

Note: this app is optimised for 2,000 products.

Integrations

Unleashed provides integration with Xero to streamline your entire inventory management and accounting processes. When a sale is made in Unleashed it flows through to Xero, and the amount of stock on hand, the stock value, as well as the cost of sale is also updated in Xero in real time. This gives you complete visibility of all stock movements and allows you to provide accurate financial reports. When a purchase is made, the purchase order is passed into the Xero system and a bill is created. You can also map the chart of accounts in Unleashed with your Xero chart of accounts, such as the sales and cost of goods sold account, as well as Xero category tracking. Unleashed not only integrates with Xero for your sales and purchases, but your customer and supplier details are also synced between the two.

Pricing

Other extras available for all plans:

• Additional storage – $25 per month per 10GB

• ECommerce Hub – from $25 per month

• B2B eCommerce – from $1,308 annual or $119 per month

• Business Intelligence Vision – $539 annually or $49 per month

• Customer Success Plan (standard) – $1,639 annually or $149 per month

All plans include unlimited products, customers, suppliers, transactions, warehouses and currencies – subject to fair and reasonable use.

There is a mandatory one-off onboarding package when you create an account. You can choose between FlightPath A ($449 one off) or FlightPath B ($789 one off).

Concluding thoughts

Overall, Unleashed offers a simple to use, easy to navigate UI and provides you with clear data to support your business decisions.

As with any new system, it is a learning curve. However, thanks to the mandatory onboarding, Unleashed will work with you to set up your business so you’re ready to go from the moment you join. For further help and training, you can also visit the Unleashed Academy Platform, where you’ll find training videos ranging from beginner to advanced, as well as business insights. There are also specific videos relating to inventory, production, purchasing, sales, customers, set up and suppliers.

When deciding which inventory management system is best for you, there are two other main options: DEAR systems and Cin7. We reviewed DEAR systems in our previous app of the month article, and the key difference between it and Unleashed is that the latter has a much more focused onboarding process. Unleashed is also better at business intelligence, but doesn’t have the built-in forecasting feature you’ll find with DEAR systems. Both have a similar price range, but there is quite a difference in how the subscription plans are organised and what functionalities are available with each plan. So, it really depends how your business processes are structured and which type of plan is better suited for your business needs.

To determine whether Unleashed is the best inventory management option for you, you can book a 20 minute phone call with customer service agent on their website.