What’s the Best Way to Track Your Orders?

Question: Do you have any suggestions for a good way to track orders?

Answer: Our industry is complicated, and each order involves many steps and details. I used to track orders manually—step by step for each order. Today there are several automated solutions, and recently, SAGE Online has added a Project Management feature to their system.

The SAGE Project Management feature allows you to create a project and track 15 fields. You can remove any of the steps included that are not pertinent to your orders, add a few steps of your own and rearrange the order to match your internal system.

All your projects show on the Project Screen, color coded to indicate their current process status. And have the ability to drill down to see more details, tracking and notes.

For each step in your process, you can designate the status as:

• Incomplete (adding a due date that is easily visible)
• Complete (showing the next due date by hovering over the block)
• N/A (Not applicable to this order)

At one glance, each project is clearly visible showing what needs to be done next, and the due date for each. As the step is completed, the status is changed to keep the process status up to date.

The SAGE Project Management feature is an effective system to keep all orders on track throughout the process and completed on time. It’s worth a look.

In full disclosure, SAGE kindly gives my name out to their clients to assist with the integration with QuickBooks and all things QuickBooks beyond that, but I do not work for SAGE.

Please email accounting questions you would like considered for the column to HGatter@AccountingSupportLLC.com with the subject line of "Ask the Accountant."