Successful retailer strategy isn’t just about the “cash register”! You need integrated POS software systems that ensure you have the right merchandise in your stores, at the right price and at the right time.
You need the ability to fully understand the buying patterns of your clients -who they are and what they want. Most of all, you need integration of an effective POS software with your financial system and the ability to monitor your sales at each till, stores replenishment, inventory status, suppliers orders planning, pricing, promotions, customer loyalty, financial position and tax/vat collection.
Visual Dolphin Retail is a comprehensive point of sale solution specifically designed for fast-paced, high-volume, multi-site retail operations. It fits all types of businesses such as fashion & garments, electronics stores, home appliances, furniture, bookstores, cosmetics, flower shops, building material and so many others … Its friendly “touch screen” user interface combined with the strength of a back office ERP solution, Visual Dolphin ERP, provides an up-to-the minute inventory availability, pricing and customer details at the point of sale.
Visual Dolphin Retail delivers the highest level of service at the point of sale for turning today’s shopper all of the functionality and speed that the modern, competitive retailer requires. It frees your sales staff to do what they do best – sell!
- Monitor real-time your retail activity by controlling the stock on hand and your sales position in each outlet.
- Support your merchandising cycle by planning your replenishment process to avoid items shortage or over stocking.
- Link securely, using different connection scenarios, your remote retail locations to the head office.
- Handle multi-currencies, multiple promotions, various price structures, multiple taxation methods and even cost structures down to the item specifics.
- Seamlessly and instantly change configurations so you can react to any change in environment; sidewalk sales, promotions, special price scenarios…
- Track customer loyalty to develop a deeper, richer understanding of the people you serve.
- Handle several mode of payments: cash, credit cards, cheques and gift vouchers.
- Manage sales on account with an update of customer balances across outlets.
- Sell and collect in multi-currencies with user defined exchange rates.
- Manage items by Size & Color for fashion and garments stores.
- Track items by serial number for electronics, home appliances and warranties.
- Empower your POS operator to offer customers discounts based on Management approved conditions.
- Handle seamlessly goods return or exchange.
- Analyze your sales activity performance using powerful, flexible and multi-criteria reporting and graphical analysis.
Whether you are running a small store or a large network of stores, Visual Dolphin Retail offers the support, experience and technology to adapt to all size of operations.
Visual Dolphin Retail supports the small store with one computer or a larger store with several outlets. A retail chain with several points of sales can adopt different deployment scenarios. It can operate:
- Completely online using a wide area network to access the data stored at the head office server,
- Rely on data replication to synchronize data between the head office database and outlets, or import & export data between locations when no network coverage is available.
Visual Dolphin Retail uses the word “client” to mean any person, business, or group that buys or pays for the services or products that your business sells. By entering information about clients, you save time entering transactions later – and you can get reports about what your clients are buying and when.
When you set up a client, you enter information you can use over and over again, without retyping, for the following tasks: fast entry of name, address, payment terms, and tax status on invoices and other sales forms, tracking payments received and amounts owed, contacting clients with overdue balances, including merging names, addresses, balance information, reporting of sales or income by client, printing mailing labels…
Outlets replenishment in Visual Dolphin Retail is made easy and efficient! Stock on hand in all the outlets can be visualized in one click. A grid displays the current situation and allows the preparation of the items transfers to each outlet. This facility permits to continuously monitor items per outlet in order to avoid items shortage or over stocking.
Visual Dolphin Retail manages even the item requests submitted by an outlet. A workflow process generates and circulates the transfer request according to a correct sequence, in order to get approved by the warehouses personnel having the appropriate privileges.
Clients can ask for a quotation before confirming an order. The quotation is identified per client and all items are entered with the required quantities. When completed, the quotation is saved in the system but the client’s position, item quantities and the POS sales are not updated.
When the client confirms the order, the quotation is retrieved with all its details, modified eventually and saved as a confirmed sale.
Visual Dolphin Retail supports any mode of payment, any type of currency. A client can pay cash, by cheque or credit card. Payments on account are permitted, if approved in the client credit conditions definition.
Visual Dolphin Retail supports different types of sales promotions. This flexibility enables the definition of different promotion schemas: different items price lists can be defined per client, items proposed as bundle, Items sold as promotional kits, “buy and get one for free” …
Complex promotion enables retailers to simplify the management of campaigns, inventories, pricing, cash & discounts to be more responsive to opportunities & changes within the retail marke place. Retail promotions are meant to strength the customer loyalty, to increase sales and maximize profits. Retail revenue promotions are structured according to customer categories, families of products, points of sales…
Customers identified by the head-office or by an outlet enrich the client database and provide a valuable source of data. When properly completed, information is used to track transactions by client or even identify sales trend, and consequently target database segments according to their buying preferences.
This comprehensive management of the clients’ database helps in the application of flexible loyalty programs: family members are linked under one identity; specific information is entered at each client level… All this information provides decision makers with a valuable tool that enables them better know their clientele.
Visual Dolphin Retail presents a powerful set of reports that helps the business analyze the performance of the complete operation.
A query screen tracks the sales executed for a certain period. Several parameters help you narrowing the search to get to the required information.
The usage of a standard reporting tool provides the required flexibility to produce effective reports and enables the users to export all report data to an external file, utilizing most of the standard supported data types, like ASCII, Rtf or Excel.
- Sales Bordereau, ideal for daily sales control
- Daily Take, very useful for planning POS replenishment
- Existing Retail Invoices, lists invoice processed by a POS
- Retail General Inventory, controls per location and by POS the inventory of goods on hand
- Sales profit per POS
- Sales by shift per POS
- Sales by item per POS
- Labels Printing.
Many PC-based POS systems are developed to use one particular brand or style of hardware. Visual Dolphin Retail uses pre-configured hardware from the most popular hardware manufacturers. Visual Dolphin Retail is not a static product. It is continually improved and further developed to keep pace with the needs of the retail sector. As new hardware becomes available the necessary programming is added to allow you to make use of the latest technology.
Visual Dolphin Retail supports the following:
- Touch screen
- Standard cash register functions
- Bar-code readers
- Slip or dot matrix printers, thermal or roll
In order to get every POS working for your business, Visual Dolphin Retail offers the possibility to set parameters to configure the POS for your best usage. Single keystroke options and touch screen support is available for many common operations such as sale completion, payment, multi-currency collection, suspend sale.
Visual Dolphin Retail is completely integrated with the superior functionality, speed and efficiency of Visual Dolphin ERP to produce a total retail package that is second to none. Information is shared between Visual Dolphin Retail and Visual Dolphin ERP. It only needs to be entered once.
Visual Dolphin ERP covers the merchandising functions to manage items, supplier purchase orders and prices. It includes the tools to ensure accurate receiving and efficient distribution of goods to store.
Visual Dolphin Retail proposes a messaging system to inform clients or management of the POS operations. When configured, SMS messages are sent automatically to Management mobile phones to inform them about the POS daily, weekly or monthly sales or overall cumulated sales. SMS has a great value to Management of large retail stores that opens for late hours.
Registered clients also receive customized messages informing them about promotions, clearance.
Administering users’ security on certain systems can be a daunting challenge. If you’re a small shop with just a dozen users and one or two critical applications, then it is a manageable task. But if you’re in a large shop with tens of user profiles, managing the security considerations can quickly become a mind boggling task.
Fortunately, Visual Dolphin Retail includes some very nice tools that let you group your users together in homogeneous work related groups. Using this approach, each user can be classified and given the right privileges according to the type of work they do. Then, all you need to do is manage the group and not each and every individual user.
Visual Dolphin Retail provides user access security Access limitation to specific fields in the POS screen; selling related controls, client information updates, default price list, mode of payment and currency can be controlled.
A user, depending on his profile, is allowed to give discounts with a certain limit. Discounts are entered at transaction level or for the total invoice. The sales price for the item can also be modified, if the user is authorized to do so.
Selling prices can be generated in advance, reviewed and approved before making them available at the point of sales. At any moment of the day, for example during the sales period, sales prices can be reviewed several times by the head office and spread to all outlets.
When selling electronics, tracking an item by its serial number is important for the warranty or repair purposes. Visual Dolphin Retail tracks the serial number, from purchases to sales, requiring the POS operator to enter it for every related transaction.
There are times when you will be half way through a transaction when the customer decides to look at one more item. In order not to block the queue at the POS, you can modify the status of the current sale as pending and continue to serve other customers.
Size and colors management is a particular constraint to the ready-to-wear sector. Visual Dolphin Retail enables matrix management, by size and colors, of the quantities. This is done with respect of to a size scale table that can identify many scales according to international measurement standards.