Retail-IT - The Right Solution For Retailers Everywhere

Cross-Selling & Up-Selling Tools

Retail-IT comes equipped with a powerful cross-sell engine and promotional engine that allows you to prompt your staff to discuss relevant cross-sell items with the customer. Retail-IT allows you to create any promotion or sales events you desire, and the POS system will automatically apply the correct, best price for the customer based on the items they have decided to purchase. As well, when your terminals are idle you can use them to display promotional images and video.

Promotions & Discounts

Retail-IT helps ensure you get the most out of your sales staff, and helps ensure you move your inventory. Retail-IT makes it easy to create and manage effective and timely promotions and sales events, and to also create a wide variety of point of sales discounts, that will help your staff sell more to boost your bottom line. Simplify the administration of effective promotional campaigns with Retail-IT to help draw customers into your stores and increase the amount of their average purchase.

Retail-IT's easy two-step template allows you to create reusable promotions and sales events for single products, combinations of products, and product categories. As well, you can create tiered promotions, allowing you to offer better pricing on volume purchases.

Cash Management

Retail-IT lets you keep very tight control of all cash management processes, including tracking the cash level at each and every terminal in real-time. The system always ensures that the user is accountable for what's in their cash drawer, and tracks all cash drawer related activities. The terminal open and closing process ensures that all cash and other payment types are balanced at the end of each shift and / or at the end of the day. As well, Retail-IT gives you the option to open and close either at the counter or in the back office.

Tender (Payments) & Sales Tax Management

The system allows you to easily define the tender types and credit card types that you will accept at any of your locations, and also allows you to accept foreign cash and manage exchange rates. For cheque (that's a check in the US) payments, you can define how many types of ID you need to ask for and which types of identification are acceptable. You can improve your sales transaction efficiency greatly when you utilize an integrated credit and debit card payment solution. All amounts owing are recalculated on the fly, so the total is always up to date with what's been added to the list or what has been paid for at any point. The system calculates any applicable price changes based on discounts, promotions, and tax exemptions, as well as calculating the appropriate sales taxes. You can configure all relevant sales tax codes and rates to ensure the appropriate sales tax is charged in the relevant jurisdiction.

Activity Reason Codes

Retail-IT allows you to define an extensive range of activity reason codes for discounts, promotions, marketing campaigns, returns and exchanges, etc. This allows you to easily keep track of which marketing campaigns are reaching your customers, which discount codes are used the most, why the customer is returning a product, etc.

Hardware & Peripherals

Retail-IT's POS system is an intuitive, easy to learn system that is designed to work with any OPOS hardware and peripherals. It is designed with the user's goals in mind, allowing them to use multiple input mechanisms such as a scanner, keyboard and mouse, or a touch screen monitor (with optional virtual keyboard).

The Inventory Management function in Retail-IT enables you to manage the following functional areas:

Inventory Control

Retail-IT gives you full control over your inventory at all times, in real-time. Each and every sale and return, and all other inventory-related activities, are stamped with the date, time and User ID of the individual who performed that inventory affecting transaction, helping you to track down suspicious activity. You can track each and every serialized item that comes onto, or goes out of, each of your stores, and know when one goes missing.

Purchasing

Retail-IT lets you easily create and manage purchase orders, and process them electronically, allowing you to manage your orders, get them processed quickly and efficiently, allowing you to get the new inventory you need in your stores in an efficient and timely manner. Retail-IT also lets you set up profiles for any manufacturers and suppliers you deal with, and allows you to record key product and contact information for each.

Inventory Levels

Retail-IT allows you to easily search for any item at any location to see the current stock level. If you are concerned that you will run out of stock at one store, you can see which of your other stores has excess stock that you can transfer.

Inventory Counts

Retail-IT helps make this process easier to manage through its inventory count sheet creation and management process. Retail-IT integrates easily with inventory batch scanners, allowing you to complete and process your inventory counts quickly. Retail-IT also lets you count, reconcile and adjust your inventory on the fly, meaning you can keep selling even while you’re counting the stock in your store.

Inventory Movement

Retail-IT lets you manage all aspects of stock movement between your stores and warehouses. View the current inventory level for any product at any store or warehouse. Determine what items are in-transit to the store, from any other store or the warehouse. View what inventory is being requested by your stores, what’s been ordered from suppliers, and what has been allocated by the warehouse.

Receiving

Retail-IT allows you to track all shipments to your stores and allows the shipment to be quickly received into a store’s inventory. Retail-IT enforces serialization by forcing the entry of serial numbers when serialized products are received. Retail-IT allows you to identify defective products at the point of receiving, helping you ensure that defective product does not reach the shelves.

Product Profiles

Set-up and manage your entire product catalog, including all needed pricing. You can even upload images so that they can be sent down to the POS system to allow for easy product identification for sales and cross-selling. Specify where a product is in its lifecycle, when it can start to be sold, and if it is a final sale item.

Product Bundles

In addition to basic product profiles, you can set-up and manage product bundles, allowing you to create attractively priced product bundles either for a promotion or to help clear out aging inventory.

Price Management

Manage product pricing, including setting up future dated price changes. Manage prices for all of your stores, online store, and partner channels. Capitalize on the intricacies and nuances of the geographic and demographic differences of your store locations with the assignment of tailored pricing to maximize your revenue.

Cross-Selling

Link complementary products together with our cross-selling feature to maximize every sales opportunity. When one of the items defined in the group is sold, the cross-sell screen appears with the image of the related products, prompting your staff to up-sell the customer.

Product Types

Use the predefined system product types to create and manage your own custom product types, making it easy for you to set-up and manage your product profiles in a consistent manner. Easily define consistent attributes for similar types of products, and allow the system to enforce the appropriate behavior (e.g. every serialized item in stock requires its serial number to be recorded in the system).

Product Categories

Group your product profiles into any number of custom created product categories that make sense to you. Use these categories to manage sales taxes, return policies, for category promotions, and for sales reporting.

Product Labels

Produce and print product labels with bar codes for new stock with the click of a button, enabling you to easily receive new inventory and get it onto the shelves as fast as possible.

Customer Information

Capture and manage all of your customers contact information in a customer profile. Create, manage and share customer contact notes so that your staff are always up to date with the latest information for that customer.

Corporate Account Information

Retail-IT gives you the ability to create and manage corporate accounts, allows you to charge purchases to a corporate account, generate corporate account statements, and allow your customers to make payments to their corporate account. When setting up a corporate account, you can also add information such as whether an authorization code is required. As well as recording basic corporate customer information, Retail-IT allows you to specify the billing term, purchase limits, company limits, exemptions, or additional remarks.

Loyalty & Rewards Programs

Retail-IT allows you to administer your own loyalty and rewards programs so that you can reward your most loyal customers with special discounts and promotions.

Customer Reports

Generate various reports tracking customer rankings, anniversaries, contract renewal dates, etc., to help you harness customer information and enhance your customer relationships.

User Profiles

Retail-IT allows you to easily create and manage user profiles for all of your employees who will need to use the system, ensuring their information is up to date (you can even upload a picture if you wish). Each user profile is associated with a security profile, ensuring users can only perform the function for which they have permission and see the data they are supposed to see.

Work Schedules

Retail-IT allows you to create and manage employee work schedules, either by employee or by store, eliminating the hassle of preparing schedules. Whether your employees can only work a few hours or a few days per week, or want to time off for a vacation, Retail-IT makes it easy to organize your employees' availability and requests for time off into a manageable staff schedule. As well, each employee can view and print their work schedules.

Availability Schedules

Retail-IT allows your employees to create availability schedules, indicating when they can and when they cannot be at work. This information is then used to help you create a manageable work schedule for any given week, ensuring you have adequate sales staff on the floor at all times.

Time & Attendance

Retail-IT can track your employee attendance via our time and attendance feature, and also allows you to view and / or update your employee attendance. If you send employees home on a slow day or call employees in on an unusually busy day, the system allows you to update their hours to ensure your records are kept accurate. Retail-IT also allows you to view, update and approve attendance records, which can then be exported for processing by your payroll system.

Commission Management

Streamline the administration of commission programs with Retail-IT by defining commission for products and / or product categories. As well you can reward employees using either a revenue or points basis. Both managers and employees can quickly view their current commission totals, promoting transparency and motivating employees to sell more as they know all of their efforts are accurately accounted for and rewarded accordingly. Retail-IT also allows you to set up and manage commission pay out periods.

Non-Cash Tips Tracking

Retail-IT’s solution for restaurants also provides a convenient tool for tracking non-cash tips so that you and your employees know what amount of tips are owing to them.

Location Profiles

In addition to creating and managing location profiles for all of your locations, you are able to group locations into areas and regions, allowing you to easily reflect your organizational structure.

Broadcast Messages

Retail-IT lets you create and distribute broadcast messages to one or more stores, and delivers those messages to the selected stores instantaneously, allowing you to quickly and easily communicate vital information to your sales staff. The messages can either remain on the terminal message ticker, or the user can remove them once they are read.

Store Monitor

Retail-IT lets you monitor the status of all of your stores from your head office. At a click of a button, keep tabs on and monitor your stores in real-time. See whether terminals are online or offline, and view how much cash is in the safe and in the cash drawers of each terminal at any point in time.

Operate “Offline”

In the event of a network outage, Retail-IT is designed so that your stores can continue to operate, with virtually full functionality, allowing you to continue selling. In online mode, all transaction data is first stored locally, and sent up to the enterprise server. In offline mode, the data is sent up once a connection between the store server and enterprise server is reestablished.

Below are some of the key reporting areas offered within Retail-IT:

• Operational Reports

  • Terminal and store level transaction and event information, cash management reports (float in, float out, etc.).
  • Accounting and financial reports.

• Sales Reports

  • View sales summaries and details by store, product, salesperson, DOA credits, etc.
  • View reports on sales by product, sales person, promotion event, discount code, etc.
  • Either look for or drill down into individual sales receipts.

• Inventory Reports

  • View inventory level and movement reports for sales, purchasing, transfers, shipping, etc.; view returned item reports for both resalable and non-resalable inventory; view the movement history of individual serialized items, etc.

• Product Reports

  • View product sales reports, historical pricing and costs, purchasing histories, and promotions.

• Security Reports

  • View reports on system usage and look for suspicious activity (voids by sales reps, etc.).

Point Of Sale (POS) System Technology

The point of sale system (POS) is designed to operate on any PC running Windows XP, using the .net framework and MySQL database server. As well, Retail-IT integrates very easily with virtually any reliable OPOS device. This gives you tremendous flexibility in choosing your operating system hardware and point of sale peripheral devices, letting you choose the scanners, magnetic stripe readers (MSRs), receipt printers, pole displays, touch screen monitors, etc. that you wish to use. However, we can also recommend and / or purchase any needed hardware on your behalf.

Enterprise Server Technology

Our enterprise server is designed to run on any server hardware running the Linux OS and JBOSS application server, but it can be easily moved onto other application servers such as WebSphere, etc. Our database standard is MySQL, but we can also adapt the system to run on other common database server technology such as Oracle and DB2.

System Components

Retail-IT has three main components – the Point of Sale (POS) system which manages the POS terminals, the Store Server (SS) which houses the local store database, and the Enterprise Server (ES) which houses the central database and also the Retail Information System (RIS). Most of the transactions in the store are managed between the POS terminal and the Store Server. The enterprise server is primarily used for system administration, management functions and reporting.

Scalability

Whether you operate one store and one POS terminal, or a national retail chain or franchise with many locations and many terminals, Retail-IT can scale up gracefully as your needs evolve and your business grows. You can easily and seamlessly add terminals within a store, and / or add stores to your existing retail network – all this is done simply thought increasing the number of licenses you require.

Reliability

Retail-IT’s architecture offers the advantage of being able to operate in online and offline modes. This is especially advantageous in conditions of intermittent or severed network connectivity. In other words, your stores are not subject to issues like power outages or service interruptions that may be affecting your ISP. Your stores will continue to operate and sell, and all needed data communication and synchronization between the stores and head office is simply cached until the network connection is restored.

Security

Since it is based on modern platforms, Retail-IT has built-in security to protect your data and prevent unwarranted access. All data communication can be encrypted using SSL, and where required, data such as credit card numbers can be masked and /or encrypted using TripleDES encryption techniques. Each user requires an active User ID and password, and user profiles are associated with function profiles comprised of a list of functions and / or reports allowed for that role, ensuring your users only access the function they need and see the information they need to see.

Customization

Every business, large or small, can offer specific services or have unique processes they wish to follow that can’t be met by any “off the shelf” retail management solution. Owing to its flexible and modular design, Retail-IT can be easily customized to meet your needs, ensuring you have the functions and / or reports you need.

Integration

It is likely that you have already invested in other leading technologies and applications to manage your business. Perhaps you currently use SAP as your ERP tool, Peoplesoft as your workforce management tool, etc. Or, you may have proprietary applications that you need your retail solution to integrate with, such as a mobile phone activation system or account billing and payment systems. Since Retail-IT has been constructed utilizing open standards and webservices capabilities, it can be integrated with other systems utilizing web-services based APIs or WebMethods in a straightforward manner – and it can be done quickly and affordably.