ODBC Connection Means Your Software Connects to a Multi-Carrier Shipping System

Imagine using a computer without copy and paste. How much time would it add to your daily workload if you had to retype everything each time you switched programs? It’s hard to imagine, but it would certainly be, at the very least, a huge inconvenience. But if your shipping software is not connected to your customer management, fulfillment, and accounting systems, you are doing just that - working without an automatic copy and paste system. Customer data and shipping information should be entered once. After that, what might otherwise be redundant work can often be automated with Open Database Connectivity, or ODBC.

Put simply, ODBC is how our CPS Shipping Software “talks” to order management systems and other software. Data entered into an order management program can be read electronically by CPS without the user taking any extra action. After the box is shipped, the final shipping information can be sent back to the order management program, the accounting software, etc. This is incredibly useful for Internet retailers. Extra data entry and potential mistakes are eliminated, plus the time is reduced between when an order is placed and when it is shipped.

CPS Shipping Software can be integrated with any ODBC compliant software that also has an ODBC driver for its data. Windows supplies many popular ODBC drivers, and others are available from third parties. Take for example the CPS connection to QuickBooks available using the driver from QODBC.com. After an invoice is created in QuickBooks, CPS has immediate access to the necessary shipping data to ship the package. After the shipping method is finalized and the shipping label is printed, the package tracking number and carrier charges write back automatically into QuickBooks. This provides the shipper with final customer invoice information that is available immediately after an order is shipped. Data entry is eliminated in two different parts of the fulfillment cycle, both shipping AND accounting. It’s easy to see how eliminating this extra work saves valuable time for a business at a critical time of day. Plus fewer keystrokes mean fewer mistakes.

Shipping should be an integrated process within the fulfillment cycle. The most complicated part of fulfillment should be finding the item on a shelf and putting it in a box. Your shipping software should do the rest—importing the customer data, selecting the best service, printing the label, and exporting the completed data back to an accounting program. Reduce their manual workload and you make employees more efficient and productive, so they are available for additional tasks beyond shipping. Better yet, there are just more orders for your business and they are shipping more packages. To get more information about how ODBC connections to your shipping software can improve your business’s productivity, please visit www.HarveySoft.com.