Point of Sale Breakthrough
Brendan O'Meara from the team has written a great entry on the upcoming breakthrough in our Point of Sale solution with Small business accounting. The work here is quite extraordinary and one that we are really proud of. In just a few weeks the software suite will be available to our broad customer base and we eagerly await the general availability of this phenomenal invention. Thanks to Brendan for an excellent description of the work here. Brendan is the GM for POS, RMS and our small business eCommerce services. With nearly 17 years of experience in the retail field, there are very few people who know more about this subject. Over to Brendan.....
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Since the earliest days of commerce, merchants have had three fundamental needs. They need to buy merchandise. They need to pay their suppliers and cover their expenses. They need to sell. Whether they used an abacus, a manual cash register, an electronic cash register, a POS terminal, or a Windows PC -- merchants have always needed to track what they sell. From papyrus, to paper ledgers, to spreadsheets, to Windows-based accounting applications -- merchants have always kept track of their purchasing, expenses, and cash flow. For inventory management, they have relied on everything from scales, to visual assessment, to stock ledgers, to PC accounting and PC POS applications.
Whether abacus and papyrus ledger, or PC Accounting and PC POS -- merchants have always had to manage three disconnected processes. Purchasing, Managing, Selling. Starting in the 1990s, some POS systems pulled together selling and purchasing -- automating the on-hand quantity and recommending reorder quantities. Similarly, accounting applications of this era added support for tracking items and inventory. But, therein lies the rub. Merchants could choose to have an integrated POS and inventory system so they could effectively manage their sales and reordering -- but had to deal with a disconnected accounting application. Or, they could choose an accounting system that provided inventory management, but was disconnected from the "real-time" selling that occurs in their storefront. Either way, manual processes, dual entry, out-of-sync bookkeeping, and frustrated business owners were the result.
At Microsoft, we have spoken with hundreds upon hundreds of merchants who have shared with us the pain, inefficiency, and negative business impact they have experienced as a result of disconnected POS and Accounting applications.
Some of the key pain points:
· The key data entities such as items, vendors, customers, and taxes had to be entered and maintained through two different applications leading to redundant data entry and inaccuracies.
· Many customers who chose to manage inventory in their POS system still wanted to pay bills in their accounting system, but didn't have the ability to match Purchase Orders to Receipts to Payments because the data was spread across two applications.
· To create a consolidated balance sheet that included inventory value, customers had to manually add and adjust inventory in the accounting application.
· Customers were forced to conform to the artificially imposed boundaries of their Accounting and POS applications, requiring them to jog between the front and back of the store to complete important business functions such as selling recently received inventory at the POS.
· They didn’t have the flexibility to enable some employees to access purchasing and accounting functions from anywhere in the store, while limiting the access of other employees to just selling at the POS. As a result, they were exposed to internal theft or they had to impose rigid procedures that limited efficiency and resulted in poor customer service.
· Exchanging data from Point of Sale to Accounting was a cumbersome manual end-of-day process – data was only exchanged one-way, and information was not updated until the user decided to ‘post’ data to accounting
· Setting up POS integration with Accounting was tedious, complex and required customers to have deep knowledge of their COA (chart of accounts) or get help from their accountant. Often they had to consult with third parties on expensive projects involving custom development, data integration, installation of a database server, or other costly hardware and software.
· Finally, the POS and Accounting applications typically came from different providers -- or appeared that way. Look and feel were very different – not just where it made sense – but in a way that detracted from usability.
After talking spending thousands of hours with these businesses, 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. We felt it was important for POS and Accounting to be best of breed in their categories -- just as it is important for Word and Excel to be a best of breed in their respective categories. At the same time, Word and Excel work naturally and intuitively together. In our upcoming Office 12 release, we will release the world's first truly integrated suite experience for single store retailers. Finally!!!
So what will this mean?
- First, POS and Accounting will now operate on shared data which can be managed intuitively from both the front and back-office.
- Item management, vendor management, and customer management are now integrated into a single back-office application and experience.
- The user interface adapts to the user and role, providing the most intuitive and effective interface for the task at hand regardless of where it’s performed. Artificial boundaries are gone. Users access the data and processes based on the permissions granted.
- Cashiers can add and modify items in a sale using a touch screen interface or keyboard on the POS PC – without the need for a mouse which is clumsy and inefficient at the cash counter.
- Owners can use the familiar Office look and feel to manage their back-office accounting, inventory, purchasing, and pay their bills.
- Data is exchanged seamlessly between the front and back-office PCs continuously and automatically -- or, if the retailer prefers, everything runs on one PC.
- No servers are required and there is no expensive integration – everything just works out-of-the-box on the customers’ Windows PC(s).
- Owners will be able to manage their businesses and make key decisions with confidence that they are seeing a 100% view of their data, that it’s current, and that it’s accurate.
Why did it take so long? We’re not sure. Perhaps because nobody truly listened to customers needs. Perhaps because POS and Accounting technologies evolved along their own separate courses. Perhaps because it was hard. But, not to worry -- it’s coming soon!
