Guides & migration playbooks

Written for the small manufacturer on QuickBooks: what a bill of materials, a work order, a cost rollup and a materials plan actually do; how AegisSwift connects to the QuickBooks you already run; and how to get your items, customers, vendors, stock and BOMs out of the system you're leaving.

Working it out

Before the migration question comes the question of whether you need one. These are for earlier than a shortlist — what the terms actually mean and where the line falls.

• Concept
  Inventory tracking vs management
  Tracking says what you have; management says what to do about it. The four decisions that make up the second one, where a spreadsheet genuinely stops, and a five-question test for which you are running.
• Concept
  Moving average vs FIFO
  Same purchases, same sales, two different costs of goods sold. A worked example, why the two never tie out, and what to expect when your inventory system and your books use different methods.
• Concept
  BOM cost rollup and job costing
  Material at current cost, scrap, sub-assemblies, labor and overhead rolled into one unit cost — worked through — why a batch of one costs more, and what job costing adds when the order is done.
• Concept
  MRP for a small shop
  What MRP actually calculates, a four-week worked example from forecast and sales order down to the steel purchase order, and the six pieces of data that have to be right first.
• Concept
  Work orders vs spreadsheets
  Five places the production spreadsheet fails — two jobs on the same parts, a batch finished in halves, consumption never recorded, a BOM changed mid-job, no record of what was built from what — and what a work order does at each.
• Concept
  Lot traceability for small manufacturers
  Backward to the supplier, forward through the work order to the customer, exact where a lot was scanned and inferred where it was not — and a recall drill worked through.

QuickBooks

• Integration
  QuickBooks Desktop
  Connecting AegisSwift to QuickBooks Desktop through the Web Connector — setup, what syncs in each direction, and the company-file settings that matter.
• Concept
  Bill of materials in QuickBooks
  Online has bundles, Desktop has assemblies, Enterprise Suite has manufacturing orders. What each one does with a bill of materials, where it stops for a small manufacturer, and when that is enough.
• Concept
  Work in process in QuickBooks
  The journal entries behind a work order — issue, completion in three credits, applied labor and overhead, scrap — worked through, what WIP should show at month-end, and what Desktop does and does not receive.
• Outgrowing it
  Outgrowing QuickBooks inventory
  Where QuickBooks inventory runs out, why you connect rather than export, and the costing difference to raise with your accountant before go-live, not after.

Leaving another system

Most of these are written for the person who has to actually pull the data out: what to export, which screen to export it from, what the columns map to in AegisSwift, and the traps that cost people a re-import. The first one is for earlier than that — when you are still deciding whether to move at all. The last one has no source system to export from: it is for when the thing you are leaving is a spreadsheet.

• Comparison
  Cin7 Core alternatives
  The questions that actually decide a switch, the one thing Cin7 does better than we do, and the moving-average costing change that shows up at month-end.
• Migration
  Fishbowl Inventory
  Exporting Parts, Products, Customers, Vendors, and on-hand quantities from the Import/Export module — including the Part-vs-Product split that catches everyone.
• Migration
  Autodesk Fusion Operations
  Inventory list, report suite, and a real REST API — plus the configurable-product grain decision that is not fixable by re-import.
• Migration
  Spreadsheets
  No export screen to find — the work is in the sheet. Deciding what one row means, the clean-up pass, and what breaks months later if you skip it.

Other migrations

Export playbooks for systems we see less often. Each is the same shape as the ones above — what to pull, from which screen, and what it maps to — and each still gets read, so they stay; they are just not where a manufacturer on QuickBooks should start.

• Migration
  NetSuite
  Full CSV Export vs saved searches vs SuiteAnalytics Connect — and why Excel silently destroys your UPCs if you open the file wrong.
• Migration
  SAP Business One
  Query Generator, grid exports, and direct SQL against OITM, OITW, OCRD and ITM1 — including where prices actually live.
• Migration
  Dynamics 365 Business Central
  Configuration Packages to Excel — the closest thing to import-ready of any system here. Plus the vendor-code join everyone forgets.
• Migration
  Sage 100
  Visual Integrator export jobs and the SOTAMAS90 ODBC fallback — and why every string column needs trimming before your SKUs will match.
• Migration
  Jonas Club Software
  The hardest one here. Master-Gen, ODBC, and formal extract requests — and why the request has to go in on day one, not when you're ready to import.
• Migration
  Golf Genius
  No item master to migrate — what it gives you is the people. Season roster extracts, and why it's usually the second system rather than the first.