Manage All Your Cost Complexities with a Consumer Goods ERP

To know exactly how much money you have, you need to know two things: how much money you've spent and how much money you've made. And there's a big difference between knowing how much you've spent and how much you think you've spent. How much you've made and how much you think you've made.

This is particularly important when running a successful business. There are a lot of moving parts—employees, partners, products, warehouses. Money comes and goes quickly. You've got to find a way to track your money. And it has to be a way that doesn't slow you down. A way that's automated. A way that supports how you do business.

An integrated, consumer goods enterprise resource planning (ERP) solution can do all you need to manage your business's cost complexities. Particularly related to ensuring true profitability, knowing your landed costs, and tax and tariff management.

Profitability

You want to ensure your ERP has the tools necessary to calculate your true profitability. To see which of your customers, sales channels, suppliers, salespeople and products are actually providing income.

By dissecting your business like this, you no longer have to make assumptions about where your money is coming from. You'll know. Our consumer goods ERP can do this using accurate, real-time information that includes above-the-line and below-the-line costs, including freight, allowances, royalties, commission and chargebacks.

With this data, you can make confident, informed decisions about your business. You have the analytics as proof of profitability, or in some cases, lack thereof. The integrated retailer compliance functionality within our ERP enables you to track and manage chargebacks, automatic customer accruals and EDI fees so that you can see the actual, bottom-line profitability of each customer, product and supplier.

Landed Costs

For consumer goods companies, landed costs can account for a considerable amount of your product investment. And so, calculating the landed costs on your products is an essential step in knowing your true profitability. Our purpose-built distribution ERP, Aptean Distribution ERP, makes it easier for you to gain visibility into your true landed costs, so you can accurately gauge profitability on each of your products.

Allocate agency fees, shipping expenses, customs fees, duties by harmonization codes, taxes, insurance, and other hidden fees by product, unit, volume, supplier, or location. Understanding your costs at the detail level can help you improve purchasing and pricing decisions. And complete insight into all your costs can help you make better enterprise-wide decisions for improved profitability.

Documenting and understanding your product acquisition costs is a best practice for best-in-class consumer goods companies. Full integration within Aptean Distribution ERP can help you quickly establish landed costs at the detail level for improved financial accuracy and consistency for your finance team and your entire enterprise.

Angela Boulter, Manager of Purchasing at Dorfman Pacific, uses Aptean Distribution ERP to keep track of finances. Boulter says, "We are able to see the whole flow of goods and payment, and see what the true landed costs are for our product to make sure we are being competitive in the marketplace. We are able to analyze a lot of data in [Aptean Distribution ERP], so we are able to make good decisions in regards of our pricing."

Tax Compliance and Tariff Management

If this past year has cemented anything, it's the changing landscape of compliance and commerce. The change has been equal parts swift and dramatic. You want to make sure you're equipped with the right tools to navigate this changing climate.

With the right ERP, you can automatically calculate taxes owed for goods purchased and imported. And not only is it easy, but it's reliable. Simply because you have the right tools to access the data you need. Tariffs lead to cost increases. To smaller margins. To excessive stress on your business. To more significant pressure to succeed. All of this is manageable with a consumer goods ERP—you have visibility into all aspects of your business. You can see and then calculate where you can absorb the additional costs that tariffs enforce. And this kind of visibility and insight leads you to your true profitability. The more data you have, the better off you are. You can make smart, insightful decisions based on accurate, real-time analytics.

 Manage your money with confidence. With the assurance that you know exactly how much you're making and how much you're spending. With tools to make money management easy and efficient. With our consumer goods ERP.

Ready to tackle all your cost complexities? Find out how, now.