In store order management and workflow solutions?

[Dafydd Davies]

HI all, joined the forum looking for a bit of help and advice.

We're a family run furniture retail store and I'm looking for a digital solution to invoicing, order management and workflow if possible.

We only have one store and are a small team of 8 people so dont need something huge. We looked at Retail System and whilst it looks a fantastic solution, its way more than we need at at £260 a month, its more than I want to spend.

So, basic requirements :

Create customer accounts for easy traceability
Invoicing
Order management
Workflow and delivery management.

We use Sage for accounting and have tried it for invoicing but its not suitable, as soon as you take any payments against an invoice, it locks the invoice and you cant add notes or anything.

I suppose what I'm after is a hybrid CRM and OMS system.

I'd be thankful for any help and advice you could offer.

 

[Bala.CM]

Have you looked at solutions from Zoho. There are quite a few options from their offering if you want to pick and choose the solutions that you need. Or a unified package like Zoho One could also help.

Another alternative are the tools from Microsoft. If you already using Office 365 products, you could use the Power platform to build a customised solutions. You could look at Dynamics 365 for CRM and OMS tools.

For a single store retail management solution, my suggestion would be to use self serve tools from Zoho or MS. With a little effort, you can put together a customised solution for your needs.

 

[Paul Carmen]

It's not clear exactly what you want here? Is it a store only solution; e.g. no website/3rd party sales sites like Amazon, or plans for any ecommerce solutions, plus what systems do you have currently that need to integrate to it?

By the sound of it this will need to be your in store EPOS, so it needs to take card, cash and any other sort of payments you process, as well as looking after the stock/fulfilment management. You might as well integrate with your accounting as well as invoicing too.

You talk about CRM, but unless your sending emails and running marketing from it, do you need this as part of the package?

The devil is in the detail here, you may be able to get away with an off the shelf accounting solution like Xero and bolt on the other required functionality, plugins/apps, or you may need to start from scratch with more than one system and glue the data flows together.

Without a detailed spec for processes, websites, payment systems, stock and fulfilment needs etc, its almost impossible to give you any meaningful advice.