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Katana Cloud Inventory

Score7 out of 10

4 Reviews and Ratings

What is Katana Cloud Inventory?

Katana's Cloud Inventory Platform creates a centralized view of company inventory to maintain optimal stock levels across all of its locations and track products available for sale.

Users can manage incoming orders from all sales channels and issue purchase orders directly from Katana to ensure restocking at the right time and in the right quantities. Katana can be integrated with e-commerce, accounting, and other business software to automate repetitive tasks and get real-time visibility over daily operations and business performance.

  1. Real-time inventory insights
    Real-time inventory data for informed decisions, proactively preventing stockouts and overstock. Creates visibility into product locations, arrivals, and quantities, to ensure efficient operations and precise stock control.

  2. Built-in purchase order management
    Supports informed purchasing decisions based on precise material requirements and reorder points. Purchase orders can be issued directly from Katana and delay risks can be tracked to meet customer demand.

  3. Omnichannel sales management
    Centralizes B2B and B2C sales orders in a unified platform to identify available items for sale and optimize order fulfillment processes, driving operational efficiency.

  4. Manufacturing operations management
    Bill of materials and operations management features to optimize production scheduling, maintain optimal levels of raw materials and finished goods, and accurately track manufacturing costs for streamlined production.

  5. Financial visibility and cloud accounting
    Streamlined data transfer between systems, converts purchase orders to bills, generates and updates invoices based on sales order statuses, and synchronizes inventory value in real time for precise costing.

Categories & Use Cases

Media

Manufacturing operations management with production scheduling
Real-time inventory management insights to prevent stockouts
Purchase order management with reorder points and materials
Omnichannel sales management to optimize your order fulfillment
Financial visibility and cloud accounting with inventory sync
Shop Floor mobile app

1 / 6

Top Performing Features

  • Inventory tracking

    The software syncs orders and stock to maintain a real-time picture of inventory and supports multiple methods such as LIFO and FIFO.

    Category average: 8.4

  • Fulfillment

    When orders are received, pick orders are sent to the ideal location and fulfillment status can be tracked.

    Category average: 8.1

  • Automatic reordering

    The software can be set up to automatically reorder a good when it falls below a certain threshold.

    Category average: 7.6

Areas for Improvement

  • Bill of materials management

    The software can create and manage BOMs based on orders.

    Category average: 8.2

  • Reporting and analytics

    Reports about historic and current inventory and order trends are available.

    Category average: 7.9

  • Invoicing

    Invoices for orders can be created and sent, and invoices from suppliers can be managed.

    Category average: 7.2

Good program but will be better with some upgrades

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Currently we are using Katana Cloud Inventory as an inventory control program. Katana Cloud Inventory is pretty good for parts coming in and going out. We have been using Katana Cloud Inventory for almost 6 months now. It's functions are easy to use and it is also an easy program to learn. For a warehouse that does a lot of incoming/outgoing shipping and receiving this is a great program.

Pros

  • Tracks incoming and outgoing parts/items
  • Very easy to use and easy to learn.
  • Able to implement the program quickly and begin using because of ease of use

Cons

  • Auto email generated with PO's cannot be permanently altered in my opinion.
  • Different pack sizes of same items do not automatically fill in inventory I've found. For example, we order an item in singles, 4-packs, and 32 packs. In my experience, If we order the 32 pack, it does not show inventory for the smaller unit sizes. Each pack size has a different item number I believe.
  • Fields on the PO are not adjustable in my experience. You must create a template and use the template. You cannot change the PO each time unless you have a template created in my experience.
  • When closing out a sales order, if you invoice from Katana Cloud Inventory and send to Quickbooks, it automatically enables the invoice to receive credit cards in Quickbooks. We use another credit card service (not Quickbooks) and do not want this feature turned on. There is no way to disable it at this time.
  • When being billed for a PO that has been received and that bill is sent over to Quickbooks, it does not show item counts in my expereince. It only translates as a total dollar amount for each line item.

Return on Investment

  • So far we are still in the process of counting all of our inventory. We use tens of thousands of parts
  • What we do have in inventory already is tracked very well.
  • Parts have been in stock as needed since we implemented Katana Cloud Inventory.

Alternatives Considered

QuickBooks Online

Other Software Used

QuickBooks Online, Microsoft Teams, Dropbox Business, Adobe Acrobat