Bluefin Collectibles

Although initially interested in Oracle NetSuite, the Bluefin team quickly learned that Oracle NetSuite’s offering would be twice as expensive as Acumatica because Oracle NetSuite’s licensing is based on the number of users. “We liked the fact that we could have unlimited users and there are no per-seat licensing costs with Acumatica, so we could add as many users as we need to keep the work moving.” With 50+ employees and more on the way to help handle their rapid growth, having unlimited users was a big factor in the final selection of Acumatica. Bluefin also liked that Acumatica’s Hosted or On-Premise Solution provides for the power of choice to run Acumatica from the Cloud or from a Company’s own Server, with the ability to switch from one to the other as the business requires. Bluefin made the initial decision to host Acumatica on their own servers and chose to limit some critical financial data access to approved company executive management. Bluefin also liked that Acumatica offered a library of integration options, a warehouse and distribution software solution, and mobile access through Internet browsers. Bluefin chose and implemented Acumatica with consulting help from Acumatica partner, Collins Computing.

Acumatica: much needed platform for rapid growth

Bluefin grew quickly and ended up moving into a larger space shortly after going live. Today the company’s key metrics are all tracked, and they have gained real-time insight into the business. In the QuickBooks era, Bluefin spent hours fulfilling requests for information from departmental executives to aid in business decisions. Today, executive team members and internal staff run the reports they need themselves, freeing hours of time to focus on streamlining business operations. “Now, I’ll simply build a page and a dashboard screen and show team members how to get there and how to refresh the report, so they don’t have to ask me again. We personalize Acumatica to our needs almost daily; it’s the real hammer and anvil in our cubicles. We use the dashboard to show items like shipments per day, dollar value per day, and on the sales side, we have monthly sales totals, totals by salesperson, invoice amount by order. For shippers – who’s doing the most volume there, and what our top selling items are. In addition, we’ve broken out our brand partners in Asia so we can see how brand partners perform against others.”

Rapid access to trade show data reveals new insights

Bluefin is an exhibitor at many of their industry conferences like Comic-Con and operates a selling store on the floor. After attending its first trade show with the new solution, Bluefin immediately benefited from reporting and metrics that took months to get previously. “When we return, we can import the sales we had, run a report of the inventory taken to the show, and distinguish how well the items performed sales-wise. We are able to narrow down which brands sold the strongest. Before, we had an idea of what we sold but didn’t have the numbers until months later since that required counts of the products we brought back and putting those figures into an Excel spreadsheet for comparison with what we brought to the show.”

Bluefin continues to build on the new solution and uses B-to-B gateway for EDI transmission to large chain accounts and Avalara for sales tax rate calculations. Bluefin is now able to verify product packaging before it leaves the warehouse and in addition, customers can type in the product code and track the distribution of their asset—where it originated, when it changed hands. “By tracking and authenticating asset movement in the supply chain and in the warehouse through use of technologies such as RFiD and blockchain, order verification is automated, minimizing errors and our customers can have much more confidence that the goods they’re purchasing are authentic, not counterfeit,” says Bluefin.

Every employee has access to Acumatica

Bluefin believes that everyone in the company should have access to Acumatica, no matter what their title or function. “Everyone that works for the company uses Acumatica in some way and appreciates they can access it from anywhere. With Acumatica, we eliminate the need for Excel files and Google docs for work around since Acumatica is our single-source-of-truth for information.”

“Acumatica is awesome. Our plan is to grow to $100 million in sales in five years, and we plan to reach that goal with a powerful business solution like Acumatica.”