Stitch Labs

I inherited the Stitch Labs inventory system with very little training so found myself relying heavily on the customer care people to guide me through some integration issues we were experiencing. Every member of the team was gracious and patient with this "newbie" to Stitch, walking me through problem-solving steps and further directing me to various helpful training links. It's great to have immediate access to stock levels for ordering purposes. A great inventory control system and customer care team!

I have been using Stitch for about six months now to power my online retailing business and I am very satisfied. Stitch is powerful stuff and it can be a little tricky if you're new to understand just how powerful it is, but in a nutshell, it is the connection between your inventory and the various channels you market it through. Used properly, stitch is a strategic piece in the puzzle that creates your business and easily replaces thousands upon thousands of dollars a month of human-error prone old world processes.

I happened to join at a time when Stitch was making the upgrade to the new interface, Stitch 2.0, and this was a major upgrade and an ambitious only. There were bugs initially and I watched the team manage the transition with a mix of upfront communication (there was a big bug at one time and the CEO reached out, explained it and they got it fixed when they said they would), actual fixes (folks are working hard there) and a one-click "back to 1.0" ever present button if the whole thing was too much for your specific situation. I was impressed how smooth the transition ended up being given the mission-critical nature of the service on the one hand and the size of upgrade on the other.

Finally, the support team, even are available on IM during working hours or by email - my plan doesn't have phone support. I have found they are able to take my poor wording, translate it into something quite simple, summarize and reply. Every time I had a question, I got a reply within 24 hours and a clear one at that. Again, impressed.

In summary, the software represents a core function and empowers you to do a lot (and focus on the right stuff). The team that produced this and is supporting is a solid one - the bugs get fixed, support is clear minded and goes the extra mile to simplify not-so-simple concepts and top management is willing to own a problem and fix if it comes.

A word of advice: don't try to make stitch your financial piece too - your data and flows need to be perfect for that and unless your machine is perfect it is much simpler to rely on something like Xero for your financial picture. That said the Inventory Financial Report in Stitch is an important piece and will help you understand CoGS from one period to the next - but if there are any "exceptions" in your workflow the stitch projection need to be ignored (they simply reflect poor data in your system which will invariably be there). For example, stitch will take your current inventory levels and using historical average cost and revenue for these SKUs give you a potential profit figure. This has always been off for me, but that's because my averages are off (thanks to a promotion, data entry or whatnot). My point is unless you're data is 100% solid (and your workflow makes sure it remains that way), Stitch is NOT your CFO in the cloud, even though your CFO will learn to love Stitch to do her job.

Bottom line: once you find inertia with Stitch you'll wonder how you did without it.

I have recently joined a company as a financial consultant and have 25+ years using varied operating software (ERP, stand-alone, cloud-based, inventory...). The company I consult for is a distribution company that has several sales channels (3 Shopify and 1 Amazon) selling into both B-to-B and B-to-C customer base. Stitch software seems to work well on the inventory movement side with the syncing from the sales channels as well as shipping the units via ShipStation. So...no issues there...

However, on the reporting side and syncing to an integrated accounting solution (we currently use Xero) is where the "holes" begin. Be ready to have the accounting team spend countless hours trying to reconcile Stitch to your accounting system...

FIRST ISSUE: is with the closing of a sales order - there are 4 action buttons (pack, ship, invoice, and pay) that need to be completed in order to close the order. At that point, the order (invoice) is synced with Xero. This may work for most B-to-C activity but will not work with B-to-B (selling into wholesalers. Most payment terms offered to wholesalers are net terms (30, 60, 90...). So...the order cannot be closed out until payment is received which will be 1-2 accounting periods later. So the revenue recognition will not be accurate. Companies that carry inventory should confirm to using the accrual method of accounting, not the cash method. Stitch says there is a way to manually close an order...but again this involves a lot of review and the manual closing of several orders. My issue is that Stitch should recognize a sale once the order is shipped, not when the invoice is paid... This is accounting as it's basic (if you're utilizing the accrual method).

SECOND ISSUE: we have also encountered numerous syncing issues. You always need to review your accounting software for missed invoices synching from Stitch. It is now Feb 2, 2017, and issue with invoices not synching since Jan 27th...So that will need to be address and reconciliation will need to take place. This issue seems to occur every month, thus, there's a lot of time wasted trying to connect with customer support to rectify the issue.

THIRD ISSUE: is that Stitch does not have a "true" sales report. They have 2 basic "sales" reports (Sales by Product and Sales by Variant). Both reports have date parameters so you run a date specific report. The issue is that the Stitch sales report include both OPEN and CLOSED orders. It states it is a sales report but it will never tie back to your sales amount posted in your integrated accounting software. You can get close with the reconciliation but will need to manually back out the open sales order data. Our team here has spent countless times communicating our issues with customer service (either through email, chat or telephone). Quite often if we contact them 2-3 times on the same issue, we may receive 2-3 conflicting solutions. So...you leave the communication more confused than when you started (in this case it was on reconciling sales using existing Stitch reporting).

FOURTH ISSUE: COGS. Stitch pushes a manual entry of COGS information to the integrated accounting software only 1-TIME per month. It should show up in your Accounting software as a "draft" journal entry ready for review and posting. We have not seen this monthly journal show up over the past year. So, trying to account for COGS can me was done but you will need to spend lots of hours and run a multitude of reports to make sense of the data. Your COGS entry will not be exact but close. For the bean counters...booking COGS that gets you a close result does not work. You really need to have exact data. My big issue is that Stitch does not allow for daily COGS posting. Thus, if you're working on trying to provide financial updates to management, having them wait until the end of the month does not work. There are certainly lots of potential with this software but first, fix the back-end side.

Stitch Labs is the benchmark application for multiple B2B and B2C store integration involving inventory. The ROI on the application is through the roof!

We have over 300 skus in our online shop and tracking inventory / orders was becoming a headache. Luckily I came across Stitch Labs which has everything we needed and more. My time spent on managing orders/inventory went from 4 hours to 1 hour a day. The integration was done within hours and the support team was there very step of the way, always accessible by phone and chat. The software is intuitive and easy to use.