Thousands of businesses from the USA, UK, and around the globe have registered for Brightpearl to help them grow sales, and save time/money by using an integrated platform for e-commerce, inventory, crm and accounting.

Following this continued growth and greater demand for Brightpearl, we are looking to set up a US office to develop our presence within the North American market – as well as expanding our UK office to cater for more staff. To start with, the San Fransisco office will house four staff and work alongside the 40-strong UK office. This move will enable us to better serve our American customers and partners with a team on the ground.

We are kicking off the first stage in this process with a visit out to California for most of next month, from October 3 to October 20th (“we” = co-founders Andy Mulvenna and Chris Tanner accompanied by CEO Salman Malik.  Andy will be spearheading our organisation in the US from here on out.)

In between looking for office space and new team members to join the company (we’re looking for 2 sales reps, a support chief and a systems admin) we’d love to find time to meet you. We are meeting customers, business owners (mostly retailers and distributors), accountants, advisors and anaylsts/commentators.

We’ll be setting up 2 meet ups while we’re there, one around LA area sometime on either October 6 or 7, followed by one in San Francisco on October 14 (probably somewhere up in the city).

If you’re based in California or likely to be around, perhaps for the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco (October 18-19), we’d love to meet up.  Ping us an email at usa@brightpearl.com and we’ll hatch a plan.

Every successful product was designed to fulfill a specific job or set of jobs.  If it’s a great product, it does those jobs really well.  If it’s a great product, it’s probably also very specialized: it won’t do well outside of what it was designed for.

Accounting software is no exception– it’s designed for 2 main things: 1) helping a business file taxes correctly and 2) helping it track flows of money.  And it’s usually written from the point of view of an accountant.  What it is NOT designed to do is to help you increase your sales or to help you run your day-to-day operations efficiently.  In fact, the whole reason I started developing Brightpearl was because I couldn’t find a system that was written to help me increase the sales of my skateboard manufacturing company, Lush Longboards.

When I was running Lush we tried to do everything using Sage Accounts to avoid the pain of running multiple different systems and then trying to integrate data (products, customers, prices) between them.  But Sage was hopeless for CRM, and we really struggled to keep a busy sales operation going with the limited information we could store on each order.  And if one sales person was out of the office… good luck figuring out what was happening with an order or a particular customer.  It wasn’t Sage’s fault (or that of any of the other excellent cloud-based accounting packages that have come along since then)– it simply wasn’t designed to run the core processes of a whole business.

Let’s go back to square one and take a good look at why you want software at all. As a company, you most likely exist to sell stuff to customers. “Stuff” can be anything from physical products (“widgets and gadgets”) through to time or services. Growing your business revolves around two things; we’ll call these the Key Objectives:

1. Selling more stuff
2. Selling it more efficiently to make more profit (unless you’re planning on raising lots of investment capital

Accounting software generally serves two purposes; producing tax reports (for the government, remember, not for you) and producing financial reports that tell you how well you’re doing against your Key Objectives. It doesn’t directly help you achieve those objectives.

To sell more stuff, you need to be able to communicate to both new prospects (usually considered marketing) as well as to existing customers (sales and support) — these activities are often grouped under the rubric of CRM or Customer Relationship Management. You also need to have various sales channels open to enable customers to actually buy the stuff from you whether it’s an online shop, sales reps, telephone sales, or a point of sale (“POS”) terminal in a retail store.  And then If you’re sending estimates or quotes, you need a system to handle them, and maximise the number of quotes turned into sales (quote processing). Once customers have decided to buy something, you need a way of managing these sales, handling issues, ensuring customers are kept in the loop, tracking back orders and so on (order processing). Post-sale customer service is as important as pre-sales service to ensure that your customers come back for more – don’t forget Key Objective #1 : Sell More Stuff!  Handling exceptions and returns as well as complaints effectively is an important part of Key Objective #2 as well, so you need to manage that in some system (customer service).

Sound about right?  Now, right at the end of all these processes come the numbers which tell you how well you’re doing (accounting).  But the software written to help tell you how you’re doing isn’t typically written to make it easy for you to manage that list of business processes and sales channels we talked about above.  Plus, it’s not usually written to help you sell through more channels.

You can also sell more stuff by ensuring that you get all your new products and prices out to all your sales channels quickly. You have to keep all your products in your accounting system to track your asset value and cost of sales, so you’ve either got to manually update multiple systems, integrate automatically (techy and potentially expensive), or have everything in one system.

You can sell more efficiently by making fewer mistakes and having the system take on much of the administrative work for you. With a truly integrated system, sales from all your channels appear in the same back-office software, your website and sales team run off a single, up to date product and customer list, and everything references the same accounting database automatically. A decent business management system will have ways to filter and batch process sales, purchases, products & customers to save time and give you access to information more easily. When customers call in to raise an issue or Buy More Stuff, you will have instant access to the entire communication and financial history for them at the click of a button. You know what’s in stock and what’s not. You know which staff are scheduled for each job. You have all this information. You know what’s going on. You’re in control.

Does your accounting system do all this? Probably not, so why use it to run your day to day processes? What we’re doing with Brightpearl is helping you to focus on the things that help you grow your business, whilst also giving you all the tools you need to produce management and financial reports, without the need for multiple systems.