Unleashed Inventory Review 2020

Unleashed Inventory makes it easy to manage multiple warehouses on a budget—thanks to the fact that all Unleashed plans include premium features. This allows small to medium businesses the tools to manage complex warehousing and production without overspending.

However, Unleashed isn’t without its drawbacks too. Because it’s so robust, it’s also one of the more complicated inventory management systems on the market. But once you get over the learning curve, we think it’s a great fit for manufacturers, wholesales, and ecommerce businesses alike.

Unleashed is best for warehousing

While many online inventory platforms offer unlimited products and orders on every plan, Unleashed stands out because it also offers management features for an unlimited number of warehouses—even on introductory plans. If you’re using multiple warehouses, this feature could save your business thousands of dollars per year.

If you’re running a manufacturing company, Unleashed has a number of standout features to help your business grow too. Specifically, we like that the platform includes batch tracking and a disassembly feature (so you can dismantle unsold products and return their components to your raw inventory). Unleashed’s bill of materials (BOM) feature is also geared toward helping food production companies keep track of their recipes—making it perfect for breweries, bakeries, and pretty much any other business making food.

Unleashed pros and cons

Unleashed pros

There’s a lot to love about Unleashed’s inventory management solution, but if we have to choose . . . we love that you can get all of Unleashed’s features on every plan. That means you don’t have to upgrade to a super-expensive plan to get multi-warehouse support—it’s all included.

Unleashed’s manufacturing features are also pretty solid, with all the common features needed by production businesses. And we like that Unleashed helps you track all your product costs, including third-party assembly costs (just in case you have to hire a separate company to put your items together) and commonly overlooked supply chain costs (like customs fees).

Unleashed software also helps you analyze your business’s performance with insightful reports, which are easy to find thanks to the platform’s easy-to-use, cloud-based interface. And to top it all off, Unleashed’s customer service is excellent—so you can rely on problems being resolved quickly.

Unleashed cons

In general, we think one of Unleashed’s strengths is the fact that it includes all features with every plan. But it does come with a downside: the platform may be overly complicated for many small businesses.

Every tool is built to accommodate the complex inventory processes commonly used by large companies—but not every business needs those complex processes. The result? Even with its user-friendly interface, Unleashed isn’t always easy to use.

Unleashed further caters to larger businesses by offering less flexibility across the whole platform. You can’t search by product name, customize business reports based on the data you want to see, or edit product counts. For big businesses, this inflexibility may help to enhance accuracy company-wide (since individual users can’t tweak product counts to cover up employee theft, for instance). But for small businesses with limited products and a single inventory manager, this inflexibility becomes more of a hindrance than a help.

For all its perks, Unleashed is also missing some of the more advanced features offered by other inventory software—like demand forecasting and bin-level stock tracking. And while Unleashed works perfectly with some integrations (like Xero accounting), it doesn’t seem to play nice with others (like Magento 2).

Unleashed plans and pricing

Unleashed includes every feature on every plan. However, the price for each plan can change based on the number of users your business needs.

Each Unleashed plan includes the following features:

• Unlimited products
• Unlimited customers
• Unlimited suppliers
• Unlimited transactions
• Unlimited integrations
• Unlimited warehouses
• Unlimited currencies
• Mobile sales app
• Sandbox environment
• Basic B2B ecommerce
• Document designer
• 10 product attribute sets
• Production module
• Serial and batch tracking
• Email and community support
• Assisted onboarding

Unleashed API access

So if each plan offers the same features, why are there three plans?

Plans are based on business size (hence the plan names: Medium, Large, and Large Plus). This is enforced by the Unleashed API access limits we’ve highlighted in the table above.

If you’re not sure what API access or API calls mean, you’re not alone. API is short for application programming interface, which in this case would be Unleashed itself. An API call is a request for information from the Unleashed server. So basically, every time you pull up a product listing or start a new BOM, for example, that’d be an API call.

If you’re running a small to medium-sized business with a limited number of products and users, it’s unlikely you’ll surpass 125,000 API calls in a single month. But if you’re running a large business, you may need to upgrade to a Large plan.

B2B ecommerce plans

We also wanted to point out that while Unleashed’s B2B ecommerce feature is included on all plans, you can list only 200 items on your site. You’re also limited to just 100 customers, and you can’t operate more than one B2B store. If you want more stores, products, or customers, you’ll need to upgrade to one of the following B2B ecommerce plans.

Key features of Unleashed

Inventory management

Like many other top providers, Unleashed features cloud-based inventory management. This gives you the up-to-date, real-time inventory control you need to make the best business decisions for your company at any given moment.

Also like other platforms, Unleashed provides serial number tracking, supports barcode scanning, and simplifies the reordering process with low stock reminders. You can even clone old purchase orders and sales orders to save time on routine tasks.

None of that is exactly unique to Unleashed. But unlike other companies, Unleashed makes all of these features available on every plan. So you don’t have to run a multi-million-dollar business to enjoy backordering, multi-tier pricing, and other features that most inventory management platforms hide behind premium-plan pay walls.

Warehouse management

If your business stores inventory in multiple warehouses, Unleashed is an excellent option. You can sign up for a Medium plan and still be able to manage inventory in all your storage locations without upgrading your plan or paying extra for warehousing add-ons.

In addition to tracking stock movements, managing sales orders, and processing incoming merchandise, Unleashed software can help you manage your consignment inventory. So if you operate an outlet location, you can designate all inventory at that location (or its corresponding warehouse) as consignment inventory.

The only thing we’d warn you about? Unleashed doesn’t support bin-level tracking, meaning you won’t be able to designate specific bin locations for specific products within your software. You also won’t be able to monitor how much stock is left in each bin location, which might make it harder to maximize your warehouse storage efficiency.

Manufacturing

Another thing we like about Unleashed? It offers robust manufacturing features with an eye toward food production. With just a click or two, you can easily create a bill of materials that doubles as a recipe for any edible goods. You can even track your inventory by batch numbers, which helps you keep tabs on each item’s sell-by date.

Unleashed also offers third-party assembly cost tracking, so you can easily add the cost of hiring third-party assembly services to your product costs. This gives you a more accurate cost of goods sold (COGS) calculation, allowing you to make smarter, more informed decisions about your business.

You can also use Unleashed’s disassembly feature to add pre-used components from your unsold goods back into your stock on hand. This gives you more flexibility to use the materials you have on hand without having to come up with a complicated workaround in your inventory management system.

And unlike other providers (like inFlow Inventory), you don’t have to pay a cent extra per month to get the manufacturing features you need.

Sales

Unleashed offers a ton of handy sales tools to help you maximize your profit.

For starters, Unleashed allows you to use integrations to sell your products on multiple sales channels—so you can run a Shopify store, a wholesale operation, and a brick-and-mortar retail location on a single plan.

Unleashed plans also include a B2B ecommerce website, so your wholesale customers can log in, view your wholesale products, and place orders from one convenient spot. They can even create lists of their favorite items for easy reordering and check their order status from their account.

But our favorite sales feature has to be Unleashed’s mobile sales app. The app gives your sales agents real-time visibility into your stock levels, so they can accurately estimate fulfillment times on the spot while talking to your customers. Within the app, you can assign customers to specific sales agents, then set up special pricing and discounts for that customers. That way, your sales agent can show them the exact price they’d pay for any particular item.

In theory, that all translates to more sales and a healthier bottom line. But some of the business owners we talked to mentioned that the app can be a bit buggy at times. So take all that with a grain of salt.

Integrations

Unleashed pairs well with many other services, including the following:

• Accounting: Xero, QuickBooks
• Analytics: Lokad, Wink, Inventory Planner, StockTrim, Streamline
• Ecommerce: Shopify, Amazon, Magento, Vend, Unleashed B2B Ecommerce, and more
• CRM: Salesforce, Prospect
• Point of Sale (POS): Shopify, Vend
• Connectors: Crossfire Cloud EDI, FeatureIT, OneSaas, SPS Commerce

In addition, we thought it was worth mentioning that in addition to native integrations with Vend POS and Xero, Unleashed offers built-in integrations with your Magento store and Shopify. These native integrations come baked into your Unleashed platform, so you don’t have to go through a lengthy setup process to connect your online store, POS system, or accounting platform to your inventory management system.

Customer support

In speaking with fellow business owners, we found that Unleashed has one of the best reputations for customer support in the biz.

In addition to being knowledgeable and communicative, Unleashed’s customer service representatives go above and beyond to help their customers get the most out of their inventory management system. Unleashed offers email support, an online learning center to help you get familiar with your service, and an online support forum—just in case you need to hear from other business owners who’ve been through whatever problems you’re experiencing.

Unleashed’s blog is also a super helpful resource with daily articles on inventory best practices, new inventory trends, and more.

Best of all, you can request contact with a local Unleashed partner anytime. These helpers are accounting and IT professionals from your area who’ve been trained in Unleashed software. So if you ever encounter a problem you can’t find an answer to, you don’t have to worry about being left in the lurch.

Unleashed FAQ

What is Unleashed Inventory?

Unleashed Inventory is a cloud-based inventory management software owned by Auckland business owners Greg Murphy and Terry Patmore. The platform seeks to provide greater stock visibility, convenient tools, and the functional support businesses need to find success managing their inventory.

How do I use Unleashed software?

To use Unleashed inventory management software, you’ve got to start by signing up. From there, you can try out the platform on a two-week free trial. To get your inventory management system up and running, we recommend getting started with Unleashed’s help center, where you can find tons of written and video tutorials to walk you through the setup process.

What is the Unleashed app?

The Unleashed mobile sales app is a convenient tool to help you manage your inventory from just about anywhere. Because Unleashed is a cloud-based system, you can use your mobile app to view your business’s current inventory levels on the go. You can also use the app to contact customers, show clients your product catalogue, and place orders.

What is a stock management system?

A stock management system is essentially the same as an inventory management system—it helps you track your products throughout the ordering, shipping, storage, and sales processes in your business.

The takeaway

Unleashed is a solid choice for many businesses, but we think it may be best for businesses with multiple warehouses. Unlike other platforms, Unleashed doesn’t charge extra for premium warehousing and manufacturing features, so you can easily save money. It also offers tons of features and perks you don’t often see from other inventory management providers.

Is it a perfect platform? No. While it’s easy to navigate, the system can be overly complicated and inflexible. Plus, Unleashed doesn’t offer some high-end features you get with other providers—like demand forecasting.

Still, we think most medium to large businesses could do a lot worse than Unleashed.

There are a lot of software options for managing your inventory. Fortunately, we’ve done all the hard work and narrowed it down to just the six best inventory management platforms for small businesses. Check out our guide to see how Unleashed compares.

Disclaimer

At Business.org, our research is meant to offer general product and service recommendations. We don’t guarantee that our suggestions will work best for each individual or business, so consider your unique needs when choosing products and services.

Sources

1. TradeGecko, “Inventory Management Software“
2. TradeGecko, “Inventory Management Software“
3. Capterra, “TradeGecko Reviews and Pricing“