The beauty industry confronts unique and unprecedented business-related challenges, including constantly changing marketing and product trends. Due to rapidly evolving technologies and the introduction of social media, many in the beauty industry have experienced more change in the past few years than in the previous 100 years combined.

As a result, beauty companies must adapt to meet changing customer expectations from sourcing and ingredients, sustainability, demographic profiles, to the customer’s e-commerce experience. Those that can differentiate themselves succeed by standing apart, while those that don’t can quickly stifle their growth and fall short of achieving their goals.

Here, we answer common questions about financial systems to help your beauty company address common challenges to stay ahead in this competitive industry.

Why Should My Company Upgrade Its Financial Management System?

One of the most important decisions a business makes is which tool they will use to manage their finances and cash flow. As a starter system, something like QuickBooks may seem like a logical and economical choice. However, heightened customer demands, rapid growth, and increased competition mean companies can no longer rely on the business models or business management systems of the past. Today’s businesses need a scalable financial management system that can support your business as it transforms.

The ideal solution can help efficiently manage the complexities of your beauty business with:

• Real-time, cross channel inventory visibility from raw materials and components to finished goods
• Omnichannel order management—in-store, web, call center, mobile, kiosk—all in one place
• An automated process that connects your front-end to your back-end to provide the highest user experience while decreasing costs across your business
• A unified online and in-store experience to satisfy omnichannel customer demand and exceed buyer expectations
• Efficient and easy integration with customer payment processing platforms such as Shopify, and sales tax software, such as Avalara
• A buy anywhere, fulfill anywhere, return anywhere experience
• Empowered sales associates and customer service representatives with a deep understanding of the customer

Here’s a visual display of how an ERP system can benefit your beauty company.

When Should My Company Upgrade Its Financial Management System?

Your company should change its financial management system if it’s no longer able to keep up with your business growth, customer demands, and changing industry expectations. Some indications of this are:

• It’s hard to find out what’s happening across your business in real-time
• The current system lacks a sufficient inventory management tool
• Team members spend time on manual processes and building manual spreadsheets instead of working to grow and improve the business
• Staff must manually consolidate financials between systems
• It’s difficult to add new sales channels, product lines or product bundles, or revenue streams domestically or internationally
• It’s difficult to gain visibility into customers and their behavior—for instance, their experience, purchase history, and lifetime value

Is there a Unified IT Solution for the Beauty Industry?

An integrated enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, such as NetSuite, could help eliminate some of the manual work and reporting being done by many growing beauty companies.

NetSuite can reduce the spreadsheet fatigue encountered when manually reconciling inventory and sales across multiple systems thereby connecting your front-end to your back-end. It does this by providing integrated, on-demand financial and operational reporting that can be accessed in real-time from any device. NetSuite also makes expanding into new markets—either online or brick and mortar—easier as your company grows by simplifying the process of adding additional product lines, sales channels, or new revenue streams.

Because NetSuite is a single system that covers a broad range of business processes, activities can be linked in a single workflow, and information is visible in real-time across parts of the business. Real-time inventory levels are available, and raw goods to finished goods are tracked and displayed with the accounting impact shown in real-time. This eliminates the need for the integration of multiple systems or manual processes.

NetSuite provides visibility and insight into key areas, such as:

• Inventory availability
• The impact of operational processes on other functions, such as accounting and sales forecasting
• Customer behavior and experience

This allows you to make better decisions based on facts, rather than guesswork or disparate spreadsheets.

Other potential benefits NetSuite provides beauty companies include the ability to:

• Increase staff productivity, decrease transaction costs, close the books faster, and leverage robust reporting tools that deliver real-time insight into financial and operational performance
• Monitor manufacturing while efficiently controlling and tracking product movement throughout the complex manufacturing processes
• Eliminate inventory silos between channels and locations to achieve the ideal product assortment
• Manage inventory by first in first out (FIFO), expiration date, or lot number to avoid wasted products or out-of-stock notifications and be able to track inventory for quality purposes
• Free up cash flow and better meet customer demand with unified inventory data across all channels
• Accelerate the order-to-cash process, decrease inventory holding costs, and enable omnichannel operations by tying sales, finance, and order fulfillment to pricing, sales order management, and returns management
• Increase efficiencies, streamline operations, and provide a better understanding of bottom-line costs while maintaining the right inventory mix across the business
• Track campaign performance and manage sales incentive compensation and gain a real-time view of customer interactions across all channels of the business
• Arm sales associates with a 360-degree omnichannel view of inventory and customer information to engage customers more effectively, drive sales, fulfill orders, and provide an outstanding shopping experience
• Scale operations and support global wholesale, retail, and multi-brand business from a single commerce platform

We’re Here to Help

To learn more about NetSuite or how it could streamline your operations, visit our NetSuite Solutions page or contact your Moss Adams professional.

About NetSuite

From fast-growing startups to global enterprises, NetSuite powers businesses across a variety of industries. NetSuite provides cloud financials, customer relationship management (CRM), e-commerce, human capital management (HCM), and professional services automation management for all organizations from fast-growing midsize companies to large global organizations. Additionally, each component of NetSuite is modular, enabling it to be deployed and integrated with existing investments as required.

With more than 36,000 customers running NetSuite worldwide and dependent territories, some of the world's most innovative organizations trust NetSuite and take their financial and operational processes to the cloud.