ERP can come with a serious price tag. For a small business owner used to paying for accounting software or a handful of separate programs, the cost can be hard to swallow.
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As the year winds down, small and mid-sized businesses often find themselves scrambling to tie up loose ends—especially on the financial side. Whether it's incomplete or messy books, inventory gaps, or missing budgets, the consequences of inaction or missteps throughout the year come due in Q4. These issues might seem minor during the busy-ness of daily operations, but they can quickly snowball ...
There comes a point when “the way we’ve always done it” starts costing more than it saves. For Keener Electric Motors, that point looked like long days, stacks of paperwork, handwritten notes, and too much time spent searching for information that should have been easy to find. Owner Bill Weidman was regularly working 13- and 14-hour days, six days a week, and much of that time was being consumed ...
Inventory numbers don’t quite match. An order gets entered twice because one program doesn’t talk to another. Purchasing decisions depend on a spreadsheet or what someone remembers. And simple questions about margins, cash flow, or what’s actually on the shelf take more digging than they should.
When work piles up, most leaders do what they think good leaders are supposed to do: they push harder, jump in to fix things, stay later, and tell their teams to hang on, just a little longer. I understand that instinct. It usually comes from a place of care, not control. But after years of working with business owners and management teams through high-pressure seasons, I’ve learned something ...
At Bontrager Welding & Steel, growth came easier than expected. Within a few short years, Lonnie Bontrager went from working as a young, adolescent farm hand where he learned some hands-on welding skills, to running a business that distributes steel fencing products to cattle farms across the country. This company manufactures and distributes pipe, panels, gates, and fencing components, both ...
When choosing operational software like an ERP it is crucial to find a system that will flex and change with you over the years. Cedar Crest Equipment, a leading provider of dairy farm equipment in Pennsylvania and surrounding states, has been steadily growing since its founding in 1989. As they expanded their operations to multiple locations and increased their product offerings, they realized ...
Turtle Mountain Seed Company had the numbers. What they did not always have was the time to use them.
When Dutch Country Cheese started mapping out the next stage of their growth, they knew they needed more than spreadsheets and QuickBooks to carry the load.
Field service needs to be fast, reliable, and thorough. With multiple service technicians out in the field and jobs constantly coming in, keeping track of it all can get messy fast. For AW Machinery, that was the reality. “Everything was being tracked on a spreadsheet, and it was easy for things to get missed or duplicated,” said Isaac. “It wasn’t a bad system—it just wasn’t built for where we ...
The Caliber Metal team used to manage everything through QuickBooks and Excel. It worked fine when they were small, but as soon as they started building a larger customer base, cracks began to show.
In the early 1980s, Marvin Sensenig dismantled the engine of his lawn mower atop his kitchen table, seeking to understand the intricacies of how it works and how to keep it running at peak performance. A couple years later he turned his “hobby” into an official side business: Sensenig’s Repair and Sales. As more and more people heard about Sensenig’s, it became Marvin’s full-time job.