Tradebox Finance Manager is one of the solutions which seems to have been around forever in the eBay world. Put simply, Tradebox sucks your sales data out of eBay, PayPal, Amazon (and any number of other platforms) and squirts it into Sage 50 Accounts pretty much automating your accounting for marketplace and website sales.
Tradebox and Sage
Universally loved by it’s users, the one downside of Tradebox has always been that you have to use Sage. Sage are one of the biggest accounting software solutions available, but for someone that’s never used Sage before it’s a pretty steep learning curve to get to grips with.
Nonetheless, Tradebox provide Sage Accounts integration for over 1,300 UK online retailers. Their main focus has always been on the customer because their needs inform the good changes that allow the software and the company to flourish. They have created a niche position in Sage accountancy integration and rightly earned a good reputation for their 5 star approach to customer service and in-depth knowledge of Sage Accounts.
Tradebox without Sage
Tradebox are now moving beyond Sage to include integration into other accountancy packages as part of their offering.
To enable this they have had to write an entirely new program to enable orders to come into Tradebox independently. As the existing software is middleware, it is intrinsically linked with Sage even during the download process. The requirement to integrate with new accountancy channels (think Xero, Quickbooks and Sage One etc) has dictated a completely standalone solution which can operate with, or without, Sage or any future accounting packages.
This provides basic but robust order management and stock control features within the new Tradebox solution itself which in effect has become a standalone solution. It is complemented by a new Tradebox service which runs constantly in the background; downloading orders, updating statuses, amending stock levels and then passing the amended stock levels back to all of the channels it is integrated with.
The future roadmap for Tradebox
The roadmap is to replicate all of the functionality/integrations in Finance Manager within the new Tradebox software for launch, plus all of the new features the program requires to operate independently. They are quite a way along already and are about to launch a pre-release program for new and existing users wishing to try out the software.
Tradebox expect to be completely feature complete by the end of the year with a view to launching in Q2 next year. As you would expect all existing users will get the software for free and will receive assistance in migrating over to it.
Following release Tradebox will be looking for new integration opportunities with new online channels, webstores, marketplaces and 3rd parties, including accounts packages.
Congratulations to the Tradebox team
This is the culmination of over 10 years of work in the online marketplace accounting sector – Tradebox launched some nine months before Tamebay and we’ve been writing about them since 2007.
Sage integration will always be part of what Tradebox are experts in and this will always form part of the Tradebox functionality, but the team there are all excited about the expansion. It’s going to open up Tradebox to a whole new generation of marketplace sellers.
It’s great to see a company expanding their services, congratulations to the entire Tradebox team.
If you would like to be one of the first to trial the new Tradebox, fill out the application online.
