With the growth of ecommerce, business owners are looking for ways to automate their daily operations to increase revenue, save on costs, and improve customer experience. Despite the advances in technology, many business owners still rely on manual data entry to do their accounting. This leads to wasted time, money, as well as human errors. It is estimated that many business owners spend hundreds of hours a year entering the data themselves, or pay tens of thousands of dollars a year to hire someone else to do it.
Manual data entry also has many hidden costs. First, errors in bookkeeping need to be corrected by professional bookkeepers or accountants, costing the company additional resources. Second, as many business owners are not proficient in tax laws, they frequently underestimate their expenses, and pay more in taxes than necessary. Finally, errors can lead to delays in order fulfillment, shipping the wrong items to customers, and low customer reviews. Some marketplaces such as Amazon remove seller listings if customers repeatedly have poor experiences. It is no exaggeration to state that a lack of automation can lead some businesses to go out of business.
Founder and CEO at Connex
This is where Sync with Connex comes in. Their two products, Connex for QuickBooks Desktop and Connex for QuickBooks Online, have already helped thousands of businesses to automate their bookkeeping and increase their revenues. In essence, Connex for QuickBooks copies data
(sales receipts, invoices, inventory, etc.) between ecommerce channels such as Shopify, Amazon, and eBay. Overall Connex for QuickBooks integrates with over 25 ecommerce platforms, and allows users to integrate multiple selling channels with QuickBooks.
Below is a Q&A session with Joseph Anderson, Founder and CEO of Sync with Connex, and author of the book “The $20 SaaS Company: From Zero to Seven Figures Without Venture Capital”.
First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When was Connex established and what are your goals?
Back in 2009, I worked for a software company where an intern manually entered 100 orders into QuickBooks every day. I realized that the company wouldn’t be able to grow if they relied on manual data entry, and wondered how the process of entering data into QuickBooks could be automated.
In 2010, I started my own company and automated data transfer between e-commerce platforms and QuickBooks Online and Desktop. Besides automating data entry into QuickBooks, Connex also helps ecommerce stores manage online inventories, map sales taxes, and match deposits into bank accounts.
What industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
Most of our customers are based in the US, Canada and the UK. They are small-to-medium size online retail businesses. They sell consumer products such as sunglasses, soap, nutraceuticals, candles, and personal care products.
Which versions of QuickBooks do you support?
We support QuickBooks Online and QuickBooks Desktop editions such as Pro, Premier and Enterprise. We also support QuickBooks Wholesale and Manufacturing Edition, and QuickBooks in the Cloud. Some of our customers host their own QuickBooks, others are hosted by hosting companies such as Right Networks or Ace Cloud Hosting. At this time, we do not support QuickBooks Point of Sale (POS).
Why do you think it is important for business owners to automate data entry into QuickBooks?
As a business owner, I know from experience how much time it takes to run a business. In order to stay competitive, a business owner cannot be bothered with mundane tasks such as entering data manually into QuickBooks. Even if he or she hires someone to do it, manual data entry makes it nearly impossible to scale.
First, when you hire someone to enter data for you, there will be human errors. I need to make financial decisions every day, and it would be impossible to do so if I didn’t have accurate financial information at hand.
Connex for QuickBooks gives business owners peace of mind that their sales data is in QuickBooks, and it is accurate. This enables them to make the best decisions to grow their businesses, create new products, and hire additional staff.
What challenges do your customers face when they reach out to you?
When customers reach out to us, they already know that they should automate data entry into QuickBooks. They see the costs of entering the data themselves or hiring someone to do it. However, they are not sure whether our tool is compatible with their business processes. We ask all potential customers to talk to someone on our team before purchasing. This way the customer can make the best decision regarding whether our software is the right fit for them.
How have your customers improved their bottom lines after using your product?
Many of our customers started out as a one or two-person operation, entering data by hand into QuickBooks. After years of manual data entry they felt burned out and wanted to have better work-life balance. With Connex, they had the peace of mind that all their sales data was automatically entered into QuickBooks. This allowed them to work fewer hours, expand into additional selling channels, and increase their revenues. Some of our customers are now able to sell to large-chain stores such as Lowe’s or Whole Foods.
Tell us more about your software, Connex for QuickBooks. What are its key features and capabilities? How does it compare to other QuickBooks automation tools on the market?
There are several factors that set Connex for QuickBooks apart from other automation tools. The first one is that our software is highly customizable. We have customers with a single selling channel who gross a few hundred thousand dollars a year in sales. Other customers make millions of dollars in sales every year. We can customize how we map the fields to QuickBooks, which makes it easy for multi-channel sellers to keep their inventory up-to-date. We map products, inventory, orders, and customers to QuickBooks. In addition, we make it easier for our customers to process returns, refunds, gift cards and coupon codes.
We also offer automated deposit matching for Stripe, PayPal, Amazon, and Square, which makes it very easy for our customers to reconcile their online payouts with their bank deposits.
Our multi-channel sellers appreciate the two-way inventory sync we provide between their selling channels and QuickBooks. This ensures that they don’t have to worry about oversells.
We integrate with the most popular ecommerce platforms, including shipping solutions, selling channels, and payment processors such as Stripe and Square. We are a full solution for ecommerce businesses who would like accurate financial data in their QuickBooks.
In addition, we are fully US-based, so our customers have peace of mind that they will be onboarded and supported by a US-based staff.
Looking into the future, what are some market trends or technologies in ecommerce and how is Sync with Connex meeting these?
We are already seeing a significant portion of retail transitioning into the online space. Consumers like the convenience of shopping 24/7 and businesses need automations to fulfill orders and update their inventories around the clock. With the automation provided by our software, our customers have peace of mind that their books are automatically updated any time of day. My company also stays on top of updates by QuickBooks and our other integration partners to ensure that customers get the highest level of service and best experience possible.
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