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Bespoke Solutions

Mobile POS System

The Brief

Ian Taylor Free Range Eggs is a growing free range egg company in Yorkshire. They approached us in the hope we could computerise their paper-based system. This carried the need to be able to log sales on a mobile device and automatically manage the accounts side of the business, including daily cash sale invoicing and account customer invoicing on a monthly basis. Another request was to provide analysis on turnover and product sales.

What Does The Solution Do?

Connectivity Solution

Given the rural location of many of the client’s customers, a data connection is rarely available when sales need to be recorded. This meant that we had to make sure the mobile POS (point of sale) system would work even without a connection. Sales must be stored locally to be uploaded later when a signal becomes available.

Cloud-based

Operations software back at base is used to manage the customer list, products and pricing policy. This software connects directly to the cloud using the stable connection at the office. Any changes made to customer details, products and pricing in the office must be synced to the mobile devices when each one receives a data connection.

Saves Time

Running a business is time-consuming enough. The client was spending many hours on keeping the books up to date using manual methods. A huge part of the brief was to reduce this administration time as much as possible. The main time was logging cash sales and doing monthly account invoicing. We had to find a way to get this time down.

The POS software was built for tablets. This install includes an SQL Local DB which is used to hold customer, product, and pricing details. The local database is also used to store sales and payments throughout the day. The pocket-sized Bluetooth printer goes with the tablet and gives the driver the option to give a sales receipt at the point of sale; all without a cloud connection. When the delivery driver gets back to base, he-she uses a toggle on the software to “Go Online”. This uploads all sales to the could database and syncs any changes made to the customer and products list.

Every tablet used by the client is registered with the operations software. Using this register, any changes made to customers, products and pricing are pushed to the tablets when they “Go Online”. The system also calculates any money owed by cash sale customers. These values are sent to each tablet so the sales staff can see any money owed when they next visit the customers.

When the operations software is loaded, all cash sales are invoiced automatically, leaving account sales to be invoiced at the end of each month. This account customer invoicing has reduced an all-day task into a couple of button clicks that invoice all account customers for the products they have bought during the month.

The system has also grown to encompass new requests, such as automated invoice emailing to cash sale customers as soon as the tablets are synced with the Cloud.

60%

With the old paper-based system, around and hour every night was spent logging sales and assigning invoice numbers. On top of this, the monthly account customer invoicing would take over 6 hours. With the developed software all of this is reduced to only a few minutes every month.

Message From Our Client

We run a free-range egg business where we produce, pack and retail free range eggs across Yorkshire to independent retail outlets. The business has grown significantly over recent years and we needed to invest in a new invoicing and record keeping system and update from an extremely time-consuming manual system. We have over 150 customers and a mixture of monthly invoice and cash customer accounts. Having tried a widely available online system and it failing we were nervous about trying again. Foursquare Solutions Ltd was recommended to us by our IT systems support provider and so we met to discuss our requirements.

They developed a bespoke system for us that has enabled us to fulfil all our requirements including a mobile sales and invoicing app which allows us to generate invoices for cash customers and delivery notes for account customers at the point of delivery. This is despite parts of our delivery area having limited or no connectivity which had previously created technical challenges. The system provides an ongoing sales ledger, creates invoices for cash customers on delivery and for account customers monthly. We can record payments made by date and method and create statements as required. We have a customer database and can send emails to customers attaching delivery notes, statements or invoices.
Prior to this system we spent approximately 6 hours a month preparing monthly invoices which we can now produce in 5 minutes and we no longer enter all our sales ledger information manually from invoice books saving up to 4 hours per week. We can produce accurate and timely reports on outstanding payments.

It is hard to put into words the huge difference this system has made as it has saved so much time and we are confident that our sales information, payments made, and debt outstanding is all so much more accurate meaning we can spend more time on delivering the business which has grown again since we implemented the system. I suspect we would have had to employ more staff if we had not had this system in place.

The best thing about using Foursquare Solutions has been that they have always been available at the end of the phone to resolve any problem or answer any query as well as tweak the system and develop new aspects.

We cannot recommend them highly enough.

Ian and Rita Taylor