Best practices for using the template database

Modified on Thu, 29 Feb at 11:12 AM

The template database was created to focus on the Beer/Wine/Liquor industry.  It may not contain items such as food or groceries and it may not contain every item in your store.


Overview

    If you are a beer/wine/liquor store that is a new store or transitioning from no/little technology, you may not have a database containing your product mix and pricing.  For these types of users, we provide our template database functionality.   It allows you to use a barcode scanner at the point of sale, scan products in your store and the system will automatically create these products for you.  It reduces the time it takes to create your database of thousands of products from taking multiple weeks to a few days.


Procedure

If this functionality is set up on your system, here is how it works:

Using the POS start scanning products.  If the product is not in your local system, it will prompt you for a price:

The product will go onto the sales transaction as a miscellaneous product - do this for around 50 to 150 items.  You then need to complete the transaction (use cash).  Hypothetically, you can build the database while you are selling to real customers.  If you are not selling to real customers void the transaction.

Within a few minutes, the real version of the product will appear in your database.  Future scans of the product should result in that product appearing in the transaction at the price you originally set.


NOTE the system does not prompt you for other information like supplier, cost, etc.  A common response to this is "Can't I fully set up every last detail on every last product?", we cannot strongly enough advise against trying to do this.

Do yourself a favor and get your products set up with pricing as a step one and work forward getting your team ringing up customers as quickly as possible.  Worry about dealing with purchase orders and physical inventory quantities as a step 2 or 3.  Rome wasn't built in a day.   Check this article on our recommendations on how you can get to fully manage your inventory with your new system.

Here is a simple example of an issue you will run into if you try to do everything on day 1: the first two weeks of using the cash register POS cashiers will make mistakes, which will screw up your inventory.  All that work was wasted.  There are 10 other examples of how trying to pull it all off on day one will create problems.

Does this mean that you will have to go back later and update product data if you want it to be 100% complete?  Yes.  But it's best to learn to crawl before you run.

If you really want things to be perfect from day one, which is hypothetically possible - you can skip using the template database and manually set up your product database.  Expect to spend a significant amount of time doing this before you can actually start using and getting benefits from your system.




References



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