iHarmony - Product Overview

Product Overview

In a nutshell, when combined with QuickBooks, iHarmony is an all-in-one business management system for small and mid-size companies. iHarmony consists of a set of five fully-integrated, easy-to-use business management modules, including inventory management, order management, purchasing, customer/vendor management, and system administration. All of these modules are combined into a single software application and common user interface, and seamlessly share data between themselves and QuickBooks.

You can almost think of iHarmony as a “mini ERP” system. In fact, it has many of the features and functionality found in today’s enterprise ERP systems. Unlike ERP systems, however, iHarmony is really designed for small and mid-size businesses. One key point of difference is iHarmony’s ease-of-use. The designers of iHarmony went to great efforts to produce a product with an intuitive user interface, which is a very important consideration for smaller businesses with little or no training budgets. A second point of difference is the fact that iHarmony integrates with QuickBooks. To convert to a dedicated ERP system, QuickBooks users must go through a long, difficult and expensive conversion process. iHarmony, on the other hand, allows companies to continue to use QuickBooks for their accounting needs, and iHarmony for the rest of their business management functions. A final point of difference is iHarmony’s pricing. Most ERP systems are priced in excess of $50,000, and often exceed $100,000 when one factors in training and support costs. iHarmony, starts at under $1,500 for a single user system.

Product Module Overview

Inventory Management

This module is the heart of iHarmony and provides a rich set of features to manage a company’s inventory. iHarmony allows businesses to manage their inventory in a number of ways. Companies can organize and manage certain items as part of larger product categories, and track and manage other items at an individual level - by serial number, product code, or SKU code. For product categories that have items with varying attributes, iHarmony enables the creation of “item matrices”. For example, a certain style of T-Shirt may come in a variety of sizes and colors, and all these permutations can be tracked via a virtual table in iHarmony called an “item matrix”. iHarmony also enables comprehensive inventory location tracking – companies can track their inventory items at a variety of levels, all the way from a store location to a specific shelf or bin number within a location. In addition, iHarmony integrates barcoding for warehouse and inventory management. Companies can easily print barcode labels and manage their inventory using barcode scanners. Finally, iHarmony’s Inventory Management module provides advanced pricing capabilities. Companies can establish sophisticated pricing rules, such as volume based discounts, free goods promotions, or step pricing, for individual items or item categories. These pricing rules can also be varied across individual customers, customer groups (e.g., distributors, seniors, students, etc.), and specific time frames. The integration with QuickBooks is straightforward, providing a mapping between iHarmony items and QuickBooks items. You can map items one-to-one or many-to-one so that you are not constrained by the item list limitations in QuickBooks.

Sales Order Management

With iHarmony‘s Sales Order module, companies can issue quotes, automatically convert quotes to sales orders, and automatically move the sales order through fulfillment and invoicing. When a sales order is created, the system automatically checks to see the best pricing for that specific customer/item combination (per the advanced pricing rules discussed above), then populates that price on the sales order. iHarmony also supports blanket orders, so a company can have a single order with multiple line items and different delivery dates for each line item. iHarmony’s Sales Order module also enables the automatic generation of pick slips, packing lists and invoices, and supports both partial shipments and partial invoicing. The system also supports recurring billing for items that are billed on a regular basis, such as service contracts. Another nice feature in this module is the Gross Margin Calculator. As a sales order is created, the system provides a real-time display of the gross margin per item and per order. This is a valuable feature for phone-based order takers who have to negotiate item pricing on the fly.

Purchasing

iHarmony’s Purchasing module allows companies to generate and process purchase requisitions, purchase orders and receipts. This module is tightly coupled with iHarmony’s Inventory Management module, giving purchasing departments real-time access to inventory levels and costing information. This, of course, helps companies control costs and avoid stock-outs by helping them order only what they need, when they need it. Companies can also manage their purchasing expenses by utilizing iHarmony’s workflow approval process. If a company chooses to turn this feature on, once a purchase requisition is created, a notification is sent to a purchase requestor’s manager, and the purchase is only processed following the manager’s approval. iHarmony also supports buy-to-order inventory by linking purchase orders and sales orders. For these situations, once a sales order for certain items has been entered, iHarmony automatically creates a purchase order for these same items under the best terms available.

Address Book

iHarmony’s Address Book allows businesses to manage their vendor, customer and company information. Companies can have an unlimited number of customers, contacts, vendors and employees. The Address Book module provides contact management functionality such as call tracking and customer notes. Companies can prioritize their customer and vendor issues, or itemize them by type, status, etc. Companies also use this module to set up their company “branches”. This is a very flexible feature in iHarmony, and supports many different types of company structures. For example, a branch could be a remote warehouse, a separate division within a company, a remote sales office or third party fulfillment site. Companies can also set up separate G/L accounts for each branch if they so desire.

System Administration

This module allows companies to set up and manage their user accounts, including access rights and passwords. It provides an easy, straightforward mechanism to set up new users or change their security levels. Companies can even set up user groups – such as accounts payable, shipping, etc., and establish access rights at the group level. I really liked the security feature in iHarmony. It provides enterprise-class security controls. Companies can control who gets to view a screen or edit data at the group or individual user level. Another very useful feature is Logging. When a company enables this feature, it creates a historical log of all activity that happens in the system, which is useful for an audit trail.

Who can use iHarmony?

iHarmony may be the ideal solution for growing small and mid-size businesses that need more management functionality than QuickBooks alone provides. There are two versions of iHarmony: iHarmony Standard, for companies with up to 10 concurrent users, and iHarmony Enterprise, which supports an unlimited number of concurrent users. Given its strong inventory management, sales order processing, and purchasing management capabilities, iHarmony is best suited for businesses dealing with discrete products or services, such as distributors, wholesalers, retailers, sub-assemblers, importers/exporters, etc. Serenade says that they are working on separate versions of iHarmony that are optimized for manufacturers and service providers employing time-based billing, so we’ll have to keep our eyes out for these versions as well.

Next Steps

As noted above, in the next article, I will provide a detailed analysis of the features in each of iHarmony’s key modules, beginning with inventory management. In the meantime, if you have any questions, or would like more information on iHarmony, you can visit the Serenade Solutions website or call them at 800-686-4525. They have also structured a special incentive program for Sleeter Group consultants; more information on this program can be found at the website and phone number above.