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Basket to Balance Sheet. Here at Cowry Solutions, we believe that the future of retail is about being channel-agnostic. Sell stuff in-store? Great! Click-and-collect? Perfect! Amazon and ebay stores? Why not?! But the thing that brings all this together is a central repository for product, pricing and stock availability. You’ve got better things to do than rekeying this data (which, let’s face it, is out of date as soon as it’s published) into multiple systems. And in the meantime, your buyers are not getting a clear picture to inform their decisions.
So we believe that you need a finance and inventory system (sometimes known as an ERP system) at the centre of everything you do. And, unsurprisingly, we think that the best tool for that job is Dynamics Business Central, but in a special retail flavour, provided by LS Retail. This flavour is called LS Central, which sits in the cloud, so there is no physical hardware to buy or maintain.
With this core functionality at the heart of all channels, it means that you can give consistent pricing, customer experience, returns, loyalty programmes and offers – no matter how your customer wants to buy.
And you have all of the management information to run your retail business right – from up-to-the-minute stock valuation to replenishment suggestions. It really is ‘basket to balance sheet’.
At the beginning of each project, we need to get your financials migrated onto LS Central. We use the same proven Lightning approach that we employ for our non-retail customers.
Following that, we continue the Lightning methodology to roll out each of the channels that you need, guiding you through the setup and training key users along the way.
Your head office users will all be using LS Central.
Handle invoicing
Reconcile bank accounts
Deal with non-retail related expenses
Account for VAT (it’s MTD compatible)
Report on cashflow, budgets, profit & loss, balance sheet, etc.
Create new products, product categories, photos
Set pricing
Create offers and promotions
Create membership and loyalty schemes
Manage the channels
Allocate stock
LS Central includes excellent EPOS functionality – all linked straight back to the Head Office component. We can install this on existing Windows-based tills, but more frequently, our customers ask us to provide new kit with everything pre-loaded. This is the least disruptive route and can often be the most cost-effective.
LS Central has all the plumbing to provide the latest product, pricing, availability and promotions information to your Shopify or Magento ecommerce site. Because all of this ‘heavy-lifting’ is already taken care of, the ecommerce project is substantially smaller than it would be without.
In fact, if you go down the Magento route, the ecommerce component provides everything up to and including a vanilla site. All you need to do is the design elements, such as considering the customer journey, branding and SEO. [And we can provide recommendations of experts who can do just that!]
Marketplaces are taken care of using ChannelEngine. This tool gives you access to 200+ marketplaces, including Amazon and Ebay.
Customers who work with us typically:
Have 1-5 stores.
Are looking to grow. Maybe into another channel. Maybe into more stores.
Are frustrated about the disjointed nature of their systems.
Feel that they could offer a better customer experience and sell more by being multi-channel.
Recognise that they are going to have to invest to take their systems for head office, stores and digital channels to the next level.
To put it in perspective, we are not EPOSNow. Not that we’re dissing them. It’s just that customers looking for their turnkey EPOS solution probably don’t need the level of functionality that Cowry and LS Central offers.
That said, we take a repeatable, templated approach to our projects (we call it Lightning), which means we keep implementation costs down, compared to a traditional IT consultancy firm.
Let’s get the conversation started!
