Office Accounting Professional and Microsoft Dynamics Point of Sale Seamlessly Integrate Your Clients’ Front and Back Offices 

By Balaji Balasubramanian, Senior Program Manager, POS, Microsoft Corporation

If your retail small business clients are still using an electronic cash register and an outdated accounting system, they face a significant obstacle to keeping up with their big box and other competitors. Microsoft Office Accounting Professional 2007 — paired with Microsoft Dynamics – Point of Sale 2.0 — levels the playing field, easily and affordably. Point of Sale connects your clients’ retail store front and back offices, updating information instantly as well as providing ample, detailed sales and inventory data. And users say POS saves them time every day. More data and more time — every professional’s dream!

 

POS looks like this:

 

 

Old Way

Balaji Balasubramanian, Senior Program Manager Lead, explains the way your small business clients may currently be operating. When a cashier rings up a sale at an electronic cash register, it is difficult to track associated customer information. The sale is recorded into a general category — like brooms or chocolate or wrapping paper, and the information about the actual inventory item that was sold is lost. Therefore, it is impossible to track accurate inventory information at any given point in time. If a customer calls and asks whether the business has a particular item in stock, the owner must check the shelves.

 

The accounting system in the back office, meanwhile, knows nothing about what’s happening at the sales counter until the end of the day. When the batch is closed, someone must manually enter information into the accounting application to keep the books up to date. In the accounting application, the business owner can know summary level information about inventory sold and its associated cost, but can’t drill down further. No list of which specific products sold that day; no report of exactly what inventory is now available.

 

Problems: Small businesses don’t have the specific, item-by-item information they need to make smart decisions about buying and pricing inventory. And, Balasubramanian stresses, the cash register and back office are disconnected, creating artificial boundaries and remaining as “isolated pockets within the small business environment.” “Small business owners we talked to told us that they had to jog between the front and back of their store to complete important business functions such as selling recently received inventory,” recounts Brendan O’Meara, General Manager, POS Solutions.

 

The New POS Way

Small business owners can now replace the electronic cash register with Point of Sale,  which comes preloaded on a computer with a slick touch screen monitor and other peripherals. When a cashier rings up a sale in POS, it appears in Office Accounting immediately. The back office gets constant real-time data about what’s selling. That detailed data includes not only the item information but also the customer who bought it, item quantity, unit and extended price, any discount, and tax collected, Balasubramanian says. When the small business receives a shipment from a supplier, an employee can scan and check inventory into the store. That information is automatically available in Office Accounting.

 

‘Cookies’ Contemplates Expansion

Caryn Truitt, owner of Cookies in Seattle, WA, is excited about what the Office Accounting and POS system is doing for her growing business. Cookies is geared toward cookie bakers and offers a plethora of cookie cutters, cookbooks, cookie jars and sprinkles, she says. Truitt, who formerly used QuickBooks and an electronic cash register, says POS has freed up her time and made her business decisions much more accurate.

“I do all my purchase orders in the system,” she says. “When shipments come in, I go through the inventory and input it into Office Accounting. Office Accounting automatically transfers this information to POS. When I price the items, I can simply go into POS, go to the item and print the label. I don’t need to change the inventory amount. Once it’s done it’s done.”

Truitt hopes to open a second, bigger store soon and is planning to franchise her unique business. She intends to take Office Accounting and POS with her as she grows.

 

‘Pet Country’ Takes Control

Before she started using Office Accounting and POS, Joan Anderson, co-owner of Pet Country, a full-service pet store in Kent, WA, had no control over her inventory, she says. “I didn’t know if I was losing money through shoplifting or even my gross profit item by item or department by department. I didn’t know what my best-moving products were or how much to reorder at a time. I was maintaining my inventory by feel.” Anderson used an electronic cash register and, an accountant herself, did her accounting in MS Money and Excel.

Now Anderson can go into Office Accounting any time to view the day’s sales and run reports. And she’s got a firm hand on her inventory. She’s broken it down by department and then by brand. The data she gets from daily reports tells her how to price each item and decide which brands to drop. Her weekly supplier orders are accurate, preserving vital cash flow.

Anderson no longer takes daily tapes from the register and re-keys them into the accounting system — that improvement alone saves her one entire day of work per month. “I know how much I’m losing to shoplifting, and I no longer lose money through cashiers mis-keying purchases.”

 

Cashiers Become Sales and Customer Service Reps

A pillar of the Office Accounting and POS system is that it allows cashiers to focus on the customer in front of them, not navigating the cash register, explains Balasubramanian. Point of Sale offers superior cashier experience with optimized touch screen interface, freeing cashiers from having to perform their work with clumsy keyboard and mouse at the register, says O’Meara. The ease of POS allows cashiers to spend time talking to customers about store products and customers’ needs.

Field report: My new, 18-year-old cashier found POS easy to use, Truitt reports. She loves the touch screen. Anderson likes that the screen is customizable, allowing cashiers to put on the screen the functions they use most often.

 

Tailor Marketing To Individual Customers

Small business customers often feel a strong connection to the business and the extra care it takes with customers. Small businesses can capitalize on this advantage over homogeneous big box stores by marketing to individual customers based on their particular buying patterns. POS makes it easy, as Balasubramanian explains.

With POS it’s simple to enter and manage customers’ information, as well as track their purchases. Knowing top customers — who they are, where they are, and what they buy — enables small business owners to craft promotions that will bring those customers back to the store.

Field report: Truitt has an email list of customers and plans to start using tailored marketing at her second location to advertise special events and sales. Anderson gets customer information when she sells a puppy because of licensing requirements. She intends to use this information to set up customers in POS. Knowing customers’ buying history can be a customer service tool as well, Anderson says. “Customers come in and can’t remember what kind of dog food they usually buy. With POS we can instantly look up this information and tell them.”

 

Stale Inventory?  Sell it On eBay

Combine Office Accounting’s eBay integration with POS and you have a powerful tool for quickly unloading stale inventory. Office Accounting holds the business’s up-to-date inventory information — kept fresh with POS data. In a few steps, the owner can put specific inventory for sale on eBay. Instantly, a small business can extend its retail storefront to the Internet, go global and compete effectively. In addition, Office Accounting Professional 2007 supports online invoicing and PayPal payments, O’Meara notes.

Field report: “I hadn’t sold anything on eBay before because I didn’t know how and didn’t have time to read about it,” Truitt says. “With Office Accounting, I just go in and hit the eBay button. Load my picture, type the description and it’s done.” Truitt tested the waters by selling sprinkles that weren’t moving off the shelves and is excited to increase her eBay selling.

To walk through the robust Office Accounting/eBay integration, see David Ringstrom’s two-part series in January’s and this month’s newsletter.

 

Office Accounting and ADP Offer a Turnkey Paycheck Solution

“One thing I really like about Office Accounting is that it works with ADP,” Truitt says.  “I literally had not hired an employee because the tax issues were so confusing,” she reports. Now paying her cashier is simple. The cashier enters her time directly into the POS PC. Truitt prints reports that tell her exactly how much to pay and do the tax work for her.

 

Microsoft Eases the Transition With Free Customer Support

We understand that your small business clients may be hesitate to change from their current cash register/accounting system unless they are confident that a new system will work easily and well, says Balasubramanian. In response, Microsoft is offering FREE unlimited customer support till June 30^th 2007 for anyone who buys Microsoft Dynamics – Point of Sale 2.0. Users also receive access to Microsoft’s exclusive website Customer Source, which includes online resources such as the Microsoft Dynamics Knowledge Base, informative articles, online training, and newsgroups, O’Meara says.

After this promotional period ends, buyers will still get 30 days’ free support — plenty of time to get your clients and their employees up and running on this intuitive system.

“After spending thousands of hours talking with small business owners, we were inspired to embark on what we believe has been the most aggressive effort ever undertaken to consolidate POS and Accounting into a single, deeply-integrated, redundancy-free, suite experience for single store merchants,” O’Meara says. Microsoft is committed to ensuring that small retailers can take full advantage of the enhanced business productivity and success that is possible with Point of Sale, he adds.