Hust Brothers Auto Parts

About Hust Brothers Auto Parts

Founded in 1919, Hust Brothers Auto Parts has been serving Northern California for almost a century. With 8 locations, they strive to provide automotive parts and services with success built upon their dedication to customer service, employee satisfaction and commitment to the communities they serve.

Challenge

For many years, Hust Brothers utilized an older character-based point-of-sale solution that forced them to do nightly closing procedures, didn’t allow for customization of invoices and was severely lacking in reporting capabilities. Money was being wasted on multi-copy invoices that had to be printed, stored and provided on-demand in hard copy instead of digitally. Hust Brothers saw the need to update their current system with a technologically advanced solution that would allow them to grow and provide the functionality and flexibility they were missing in their existing solution.

Solution

Hust Brothers looked at the various point-of-sale solutions available to the aftermarket and decided that Autopart was the best fit. Implemented in February 2015, Autopart has proven to be the flexible and easy-to-use business management solution they needed.

Autopart is adaptable for electronic signature pads which have lowered our spending costs on multi-copy invoices, as now all signed invoice copies are stored digitally. It also gave us the ability to 100% customize our invoices to look the specific way we desire.
Robert Fingerlos - IT Manager at Hust Brothers

Autopart provides Hust Brothers with a robust business management system that fully integrates sales, inventory control, purchasing, accounting, collections and reporting processes. The easy-to-use interface and multi-option invoice inquiry screens make it quick and easy to find previous transactions for customers who have “lost” their receipts.

Multi-branch live inventory was a must-have for Hust Brothers during their search for an updated business management system. As the distribution center for all 8 of their locations, multi-branch inventory control and ordering is vital to keeping all locations stocked with the appropriate products.

Remote branches reorder products daily from the distribution center to replenish their inventory without having to contact the center directly. Autopart automatically tracks inventory as it progresses through the sales and replenishment cycles, providing Hust Brothers with the clarity, visibility and accuracy they were lacking with their previous system.

Autopart’s powerful yet flexible accounting functionality has allowed Hust Brothers to save both time and money. Utilizing features such as cash collections management, tax control, general ledger, consolidated invoicing, balance sheet reporting and bank reconciliation has increased accuracy and productivity throughout the accounting process. Autopart also provides detailed reporting for the accountants in order to break down the day-to-day transactions. The ability to instantly email invoices and documents directly from Autopart to their customers and suppliers has helped Hust Brothers save time while maintaining positive relationships and improving their overall customer service experience.

We have saved on paper costs for those customers that do not desire invoices with their statements. The flexibility we get with finance charge percentages, statement types, discounts, dated billing, pop-up notes and restrictions on a customer-by-customer basis has made our accounting process smoother and more accurate.

In addition to Autopart’s full range of features, Hust Brothers was equally impressed by the solution's ability to integrate with industry-leading catalog solutions. They saw the ability to have integrated catalog systems that provided them with images of parts right at their fingertips, an added bonus to an already powerful point-of-sale solution.

Hust Brothers are also a major supplier of compressed gasses such as oxygen, acetylene and nitrogen. “We have daily routes where we visit our customers, check their bottles and if empty, we exchange them. The cylinder tracking functionality helps us in multiple ways, allowing us to track where each and every cylinder is as well as providing the ability for us to collect monthly rental fees on them. We identified this gap early on, as none of the software solutions that we were reviewing had this functionality out of the box. KCS really stepped up and worked with us to document our needs and develop a solution that works extremely well.”

Benefits

Autopart has provided Hust Brothers with a range of benefits since implementation, but the biggest benefit over the old solution is Autopart’s reporting capability. The built-in reporting and ability to customize the reporting to suit individual needs has allowed Hust Brothers to analyze their data and make improvements where necessary.

We have been able to devise procedures to help control situational inventory control issues all by making a custom report based on certain criteria. We also have a little incentive program for our sales teams. In order to quickly and accurately track their sales on particular items, we just created a report based on the information needed. With the ability to create custom reports and having a general knowledge of SQL, the ability to quickly pull up data is endless!

Autopart’s Microsoft SQL Server database makes it easy to understand the flow of data through the system. Customizable screens allow you to eliminate fields that you don’t use and see the exact data you desire when running a particular function. In addition, Autopart’s core tracking puts Hust Brothers in control of cores, eliminating potential profit leaks.

Autopart’s ability to import and update massive amounts of data quickly and easily has been a life changer! The overall abilities in the block changes options make the information technology side of Autopart very easy to use and understand.