Whether you’ve been closed for 2 weeks, 2 months, or you never ended up closing but rather had your orders double overnight – it’s all changing again and it’s tough to keep up with. We’ve put together a list of the tools FlexiBake offers to help you get organized.
Getting Back on Track with Accounts Receivable
One of the first things you will want to do is figure out where you sit with you A/R, here at FlexiBake we suggest using our Manage Receivables page where a list of all the customers open balances will automatically pop up and display aged information. The bottom offers totals so you can see how many outstanding balances you have at different aging stages such as 30 days, 60 days, or 90 days. You can also use our automatically email statements option to supply all your customers a statement of their accounts quickly and easily.
Your First Inventory Count
This is a daunting part of reopening but it is very necessary to go through your freezers, coolers, and dry storage areas to determine what raw materials, work-in-progress, and final products you still have in inventory. Once you have this information you can begin making decisions as to whether to offer discounts on overstocked products, and what raw materials need to be restocked right away.
Reaching Out to Customers
Just as you are going through a lot of work to reopen, so are your customers – it’s important to reach out gracefully. FlexiBake offers many reports and exports to pull customer information; some options to reach out include sending out a welcome back email, giving each customer a check in call, or signing them up on your FlexiBake online ordering portal and emailing ordering portal information so they can begin placing orders easily on their own time.
Forecasting Orders
It’s going to be difficult to forecast orders through this unprecedented time but if you can lean on last years numbers to know which products were popular and which days orders were heavier and then begin tracking the same information for this year, FlexiBake can help you forecast production requirements, purchasing, and customer orders.
Assessing the Numbers
Assessing the numbers is going to eye opening. Whether it’s good or bad, it is important to know what happened with cost of good sold, margins, commissions vs. sales, productivity, etc. over the past couple of months. It’s also going to help you begin to determine whether it makes sense to cull some of the products from your product list or to continue offering new products that were added during the crisis. The numbers will help tell you the whole story as you begin to find your way forward, and we’ll be here to help you every step of the way.