Software Spotlight Series: Unleashed

Welcome to our blog series investigating the latest cloud software solutions for your business. Each blog will explore the software solution, sharing our expert take on its strengths, weaknesses and best user application outcomes.

With almost 30 inventory management cloud-based software options on the market, it can be difficult to know what’s best for your business. Each option promises to save time, increase efficiencies and boost profitability, but they differ in areas such as customer support, integration and industry-specific features. We share our experience working with each application and reveal its strengths and weaknesses, hopefully giving you a clearer understanding of the best options for you.

What is Unleashed?

Unleashed is an inventory management software company founded in New Zealand in 2009. It’s now one of the world’s leading SaaS (Software as a Service) providers of inventory management systems to businesses, with more than 6,000 subscribers in 84 countries.

Like all cloud-based inventory management systems, it gives you real-time visibility over your stock levels. But that’s like saying the iPhone is great at making phone calls. Just like the benefits of the iPhone go way beyond making calls, Unleashed offers a variety of measures to help you control your purchasing, sales orders and dispatch processes.

More than stock in, stock out

Unleashed offers a suite of features designed to help you take control of your stock levels. These include the ability to:

• quickly identify and re-order stock that’s sold out or below pre-set minimums
• back order and split orders so you can ship and invoice what you can
• accurately cost products, factoring in landed cost into the unit cost of your products
• turn stock data into financial reports including stock on hand value, cost of goods sold and profit margins
• tailor stock reports according to your needs with flexible customisation options
• use the iOS app to monitor your stock levels from your iPhone whilst on the road
• monitor your stock across multiple locations and warehouses
• integrate with other leading cloud-based software programs such as Xero, Quickbooks, Shopify, Magento and Vend, ensuring your business data is up-to-date and consistent across all.

Ultimately, Unleashed helps maximise the profitability of your business by helping you take control of your stock management. If you are losing sales because you’re out of stock, then Unleashed can help.

Things we love about Unleashed

Unleashed definitely helps speed up the sales process. By using features such as barcode scanning and attaching documents and images to products, it makes information easy to find.

For example, a beverage manufacturer might attach a product fact sheet, with information about the ingredients used in the product. Unleashed offers multiple tabs for attaching data to product files, including tabs for codes, dimensions, suppliers, cost pages, supplier prices, retail prices, warranties, care instructions labels and many others. Access to this product information can be restricted or freely available.

There are other great features of Unleashed worth mentioning that you won’t find on a feature checklist:

• responsive customer support—its support ticket response times are very good
• it can be easily customised for your business needs (by a developer)
• the Unleashed forum is a community of users where you can connect with similar businesses to get ideas and troubleshoot problems

Why would you choose Unleashed?

Most other vendors don’t offer the iOS app, which shows your stock levels while you’re on the road—great for meetings with clients making real-time purchase orders.

Unleashed is suitable for a wide variety of industries and business sizes. In particular, it’s ideal for the food and beverage industry. These types of businesses will appreciate Unleashed’s ability to capture batch numbers, serial numbers and product numbers as well as creating different types of reports, such as costs of goods sold or sales by customer group.

What are the alternatives?

While Unleashed is suitable for many inventory-based businesses, it doesn’t handle variance in products well. So if you’re a fashion retailer (for example) you may find Unleashed isn’t suitable for tracking different garment sizes and colours across your inventory.

Other great cloud-based inventory management options to consider include DEAR, Cin7 and TradeGecko. As part of our Software Spotlight series, we’ll be looking at these solutions in the coming months.

What’s the pricing model?

Unleashed offers a subscription model with a variety of monthly payment plans depending on the size of your business and the number of users requiring access.

Like any investment in software, it’s about considering the returns—by committing to using the full suite of its features and functionality, you will find the investment pays for itself. If you put a high value on the time it will save your business, then your investment will undoubtedly be worthwhile.

Want to find out more?

Get in touch with us to find out if Unleashed is right for you. We can help arrange a free trial and make sure you get the most out of the trial period.