Do you sell from a website as well as one or more stores?
Do you manually control specials?
Do you have to update information on your website, as well as in your accounting software?
Do you wish you knew the value of your stock on hand now?
If you answer YES to any of these questions, contact us today to arrange a no obligation meeting to discuss how we can work with you to improve YOUR business.
Our wealth of knowledge and ability to think outside the square, turns the comprehensive feature set of the Advanced Business Manager software into a business management system for YOUR business.
Benefits to you
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Reduce your paperwork.
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Reduce admin time and eliminate double handling of data.
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Improve your cashflow.
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Reduce errors.
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Information provided to you is accurate and timely.
A snippet of features
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Integrated website and ecommerce.
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Online and offline Point of Sales options.
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Ability to manage styles with different colour/size combinations.
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Job work in progress management.
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Invoicing flexibility – simple summarised, through to complex detail invoices.
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Fully integrated purchase and inwards stock.
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Fully integrated cash book and general ledger.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Retail - Manage a store 'presense' on muliple fronts
Initial discussions with our client uncovered the following problems/needs:
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Our client maintains a complicated hierarchy of pricing where different customer groups receive reduced pricing. Walk in trade pays standard price, whilst regular account customers and high volume accounts would benefit from reduced pricing based on their spend levels. Wholesale clients would typically have the most preferential pricing. Even within a particular group of clients, e.g. Wholesale, there may be individual clients that have their own individual pricing. Keeping track of what pricing applies to which client was of paramount importance.
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Irrespective of how an order was placed, either online, by phone or in store in person, the right pricing needed to be applied consistently at all times.
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Required a fully functional Point-of-Sale that integrated seamlessly with their back office systems, managing stock, invoicing and payments. This also needed to be able to provide barcode scanning for ease of use and be able to deal with charging to account, for payment later, as well as immediate cash and card payments.
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Required a fully integrated website and e-Commerce solution that provided their clients a secure login area through which they could access their individual account information such as pricing discounts, previous order history, packing slips and invoices.
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Needed a system that could provide more than simple stock control as many items would be bought in a bulk format, but sold as individual items, e.g. wine bought in cases but sold by the bottle or in a case, beer bought in kegs but sold by the litre, brewed beer sold as a keg or a smaller quantity. No matter how it is sold, it needs to reduce the stock on hand of the bulk items accurately.
- Wanted a system that would also print all their inventory labels without fuss – shelf, case, bottle etc.
Loosely fitting 3rd party add-ons would never be able to deliver a coherent management solution.
ABM comes with an entry level POS solution plus has a more comprehensive POS module that includes EFT POS integration. There are also multiple e-Commerce options depending on a client’s requirements all with full integration to core accounting function. ABM has comprehensive inventory management, with multiple units of measure and special pricing ability, so it was very easy for Strategic Software to recommend ABM to our client.
Strategic Software then customised ABM with extra fields and scripts to ensure that the inventory items showing on the web are controlled from within the business management software that they are in and using every day, rather than requiring them to open another e-Commerce administration programme.
Our client started using the entry level POS, then more recently moved to the more comprehensive POS to take advantage of EFTPOS integration to minimise data entry error.
REAL LIFE EXAMPLE
Branded School/Corporate/Workwear
When the options of colour and size for each style are almost endless, the software needs to step up and deliver the goods.
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Not only does clothing come in a vast variety of size and colour, but different size and colour combinations may have their own individual pricing.
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Our client had a complex methodology for working out each of their clients pricing and discount structure. In order to provide the correct price for any order they needed to consider the level of previous sales, the quantities on the current order to apply any applicable volume discounts and ensure that minimum margin levels were met for the products being ordered.
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Many different suppliers, all releasing new styles, (and discontinuing others), each season is confusing enough. But add to that fact that each supplier notified our client in a different manner and the confusion soon descended into mayhem. Our client needed a way to import these new style and pricing changes easily into their software, irrespective of the supplier!Slightly different ways of calculating and charging for time
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With so many options available, it is impossible to hold stock for every combination! Instead inventory needed to be held at a bare minimum, with items being ordered from the suppliers once a customer order was confirmed. An automated way to ensure that all goods were ordered from suppliers was an absolute necessity!
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Due to the busy nature of the business, deliveries would be arriving every day and our client needed an easy way to manage which customer order a specific delivery related to. Then once the goods had arrived, they needed to be embroidered, delivered to the customer and invoiced. A fluid and efficient process for managing the inward delivery, added value work, outward delivery and invoicing was imperative to ensuring our clients business success.
- To complicate matters further, our client had very specific website requirements that could not be catered for by traditional ‘off the shelf’ packages and needed to be able to use their own web designer, but still achieve a seamless integration between their online shop front and their back end business software. It was critical that the exact products held in their software were available to order easily online via their website and that those orders were automatically entered into the software, creating a corresponding supplier order as applicable.
Delivering a solution of such complexity requires a trusted advisor with wide-ranging business, accounting and IT knowledge and experience.
Despite ABM being a fully featured, integrated system with a wide range of modules to cater for every business need, the solution our client required still needed more! Integration with 3rd party web development, complex workflow management processes and 2 way data flow to name but a few. ABM’s open platform and the ability to customise existing modules and create completely new ones still made ABM an obvious choice to recommend. The tailored solution presented by Strategic Software used many of the existing ABM features as well as adding several new custom processes and numerous custom fields, to ensure all data was captured during our clients’ business processes.
So how exactly did we do it?
- Used the ABM Structured Stock module which allows the properties of colour and size to be added to a base ‘style’.
- Used the ABM ‘preferred supplier’ option to define a preferred supplier for each product and then utilised the built in ‘back to back’ ordering process that ensures that the product is ordered from its preferred supplier every time a customer order was placed!
- Strategic Software developed and implemented a custom process to import products, add new styles and ensure the correct colours and sizes were available or added as required.
- Used the Special Pricing/Discounts tables within ABM to ensure that pricing was applied consistently across products and customers for each sale, no matter how the order arrived in the system.
- Created numerous custom fields in ABM for inventory items, predominantly to control how the clients’ products are displayed on their website.
- Provided additional custom fields in the main ABM database to assist with collecting additional customer specific information that would allow our client to manage their own customer visits and communications.
- Strategic Software also setup processes to allow our client to efficiently manage the orders they receive. These processes are continually discussed, reviewed and refined.
- Rules were also added to automate data entry and minimise repetition, for example, ABM was set to set the delivery date of stock from the supplier to 3 days after the order and delivery to the customer to 7 days from the order automatically as soon as an order was placed. The date can be overridden at time of entry if necessary.
- The data gathered into the standard and custom fields, during the order process, is then manipulated and presented back to our client in the form of easily monitored Excel based reports, designed exclusively by Strategic Software with our clients’ specific requirements at the heart of the design.
