IntellStore Back Office
back_officeIntelliStore Back Office is a Microsoft Windows and SQL Server/SQL Express client server application which allows you to control and run a retail outlet. It interfaces to each till running IntelliStore POS, and allows the users full control over stock control, cash management and sales. It has extensive interfaces between itself and IntelliStore Head Office.

There are 10 standard modules, and 5 optional modules.

The standard modules are listed below, and the optional modules are listed on seperate pages.

Company Module (Standard)

The company module controls the setup and maintenance of your business details. For example, all the detail about your store is maintained within this module, along with your financial and trading calendar information. The users and permissions are maintained here, along with the screens that each user or users group has access to.

This module also allows you to setup the point of sale tills; for example, the till touchscreen layout and which tills are running in which mode such as the coffee shop mode.

Product Module (Standard)

backoffice1The product module allows you to setup and maintain the products that you sell. This includes the hierarchy structure (e.g. department, section and sub-section), unit pricing information (if applicable), pseudo deparments and department mappings (useful for interfaces to financial systems running slightly different hierarchy structures), sale times, age check to ensure your staff are checking for ID where appropriate, or equally not selling when they under age themselves. Ingredients that make up products for resale can also be tracked and maintained, assisting with stock control.

Products can be associated together using variants; whether promotional variants (price marked products for example), product multiples (4x this product makes up a different product allowing split packs to be sold), alternative variants (Heinz Soup linked to the equivalent Baxters), families (associating all the different sizes of Kelloggs cornflakes). These variants add a whole new angle to automatic replenishment, ensuring stock availability even when certain items are out of stock in your supplier.

The product module has a comprehensive set of reports, detailing everything about the products you have setup, including change reports so you can keep track of what has been changed over time.

Pricing Module (Standard)

You can setup various options within the pricing module – maintain a standard list of reasons for each price range, set price by margin, pricing discounts, suggested pricing including automatic maintenance of minimum margins – if your cost price from your supplier goes up the retail price can automatically go up to ensure you maintain a minimum margin level.

Due diligence control is also maintained within the pricing module, allowing you to use hand held terminals (HHTs) to periodically check the prices of products against the labels on the shelves – thereby maintaining local trading standards requirements and removing the requirements for hand written records which can go missing – as all the information is stored within the IntelliStore SQL database.

Finally, the pricing module comes with comprehensive reports showing retail prices, margin, margin changes, margin exceptions, and due diligence reports.

Promotions Module (Standard)

Promo ModuleWhen the IntelliStore v2 promotions module was originally launched just over 5 years ago, it was at the leading edge of promotions capability that our competition couldn’t even try to match.

Perhaps surprisingly, our competition to this day are still struggling to match the capabilities offered by IntelliStore Promotions, as they are encumbered with old legacy promotions systems that can’t cope with the marketing departments imaginations of today.

Thanks to the sophisticated ‘matrix’ style way in which IntelliStore promotions are calculated, since its launch no customer has been able to dream up a promotion that it cannot handle. Items can be linked to more than one promotion, promotions can be set for all customers, or limited to only certain loyalty card holders or even only for staff.

You can setup promotions within groups, funding suppliers, promotional till receipt messages, and long term promotions as well as the usual promotion cycle. All promotions can be linked to the automatic ordering module by using the in built sales forecasting system to decide on uplift factors per product associated with the promotion; whether it is being advertised on TV and/or setup on a promotional bin end, and also reduction factors for neighbour productings due to the ‘steal’ factor.

As expected the reports are comprehensive, particular performance reports which can be used for supplier rebate claims.

Finance Module (Standard)

finnance moduleThe finance module is one of the largest modules within the system. It controls everything to do with money within the system, including budget figures for reporting, VAT maintenance, multi-currency (including full euro compliance), foreign exchange rates (including an automatic link to update this in line with the daily forex markets plus your % uplift) and tender maintenance.

The entire cash office system is controlled within the finance system, allowing you to control the cash movements within store. This controls the issue of cash from the safe instore to the till operators, additional floats if they are running out of change, cash lifts when they have too much over a prescribed limit, the control of banking including interfaces to financial systems for bank reconciliation – saving weeks of work. Till spot checks are possible, and with the recent introduction of real time cash office system, which allows different operators to maintain their cash drawer for different periods of time before being cashed up, real time savings have been made with our customers allowing them to reschedule staff resource saving money on their biggest overhead – staffing costs.

An interface exists to automatically load all the store’s cash statement information into your financial system, once again saving many days of work and reducing staff keying errors.

Reports include cashier performance reports – who are your cashiers that are efficient and who are very slow and forever making mistakes? Various hierarchy sales reports showing store performance, broken down by hour, day, week, period or year. Item sales report, discount reports, refund reports, budget reports and cash office reports mean you can keep complete control over what is happening with your cash in-store.

Inventory Management Module (Standard)

The inventory management module controls all stock movements within the store, once it has arrived from your suppliers. For example, stock checks, wastage recording and gap analysis. The method of getting stock into your store is controlled from the supply chain module.

All stock and wastage movements have reasons associated with them, for example, known theft, breakages, stock count, stock check and gap analysis. These reasons are fully user maintainable.

Supply Chain Module (Standard)

The supply chain module controls all stock movement into, and out from, the store. This is where suppliers are maintained, and each supplier’s product file is linked to your retail products file, creating sources of supply – for example, you could order a case of 24 pepsi cola 330ml from any of 3 suppliers setup on the system, but 1 of those suppliers also offers you the same pepsi in a case size of 48, at a reduced cost price per item. You now have 4 potential cases you could order.

This module is where you setup your order schedules for each of your suppliers. Deliveries are booked into store stock from here, and automatic interfaces exist to load electronic delivery notes (EDNs).

Comprehensive reports are available, for example ordered versus delivered reports, and priority picking lists allowing the store to put out on shelf the items completely out of stock as soon as the delivery arrives.

Automatic Order Generation Module (Standard)

finnance module standard oneThe automatic order generation module has been one of the most popular IntelliStore modules since v1 was launched almost 10 years ago. This module allows you to use user maintainable parameters to control how the system decides what to order.

Even now our competitors are struggling to keep up, almost 10 years later. Thanks to the automatic order generation module, one of VME Retail’s customers has the best cigarette and tobacco availability in the country – something of which we, and the customer, are very proud.

This module takes various parameters into account – existing stock levels, any recent stock adjustments including gap analysis, rate of sale, minimum stock level required on shelf before the next order (MPL), predicted lost sales, seasons, promotional uplifts, steal factors amongst many others. These parameters, with order schedules and supply chain business rules deciding which sources of supply to order, result in predicted rate of sale which after rounding and additional stock requirements like bin ends, results in an order being generated.

For suppliers which have EDNs, comparisons can be made between what was ordered and what was supplied, alternatively for manual suppliers the order can be converted into a delivery note and manually checked.

For suppliers with the capability to interrogate their supply chain database, IntelliStore can adjust orders in real time dependent on the supplier’s availability – ensuring that the retailer is never left with an empty shelf, allowing the system to use their rules to decide which alternative product to order.

Reports are available to confirm the accuracy of predicted versus actual rate of sale, allowing staff to fine tune the parameters they have set.

Audit Module (Standard)

The audit module controls reporting of what all of your staff are doing on the system, whether that be till operators to monitor their performance and track potential fraud, or the users of the back office system.

IT Support Module (Standard)

The IT support module contains all the various functions built into the system for a customer’s IT department to use to assist users with any support or training queries they may have.

Whilst larger customers may have their own IT department, a large proportion of VME’s customers use VME themselves, or one of VME’s partners to manage this on their behalf.