One of the most powerful tools in business is collaboration. In the cellular retail environment, there are three collaborative entities that depend on the same data for smooth operation. They consist of: front office sales, activations, and customer management; supply chain and inventory control; and finally finance and HR. Keeping these entities tightly networked through accurate information may mean the difference between your business humming along smoothly or being bled dry by inefficiency and wasted effort. If the accounting, POS, and carrier activation systems are not fully integrated, then information is being entered more than once. So whether double entries are related to your customers, employees, or products, they cause gaps in your collaborative network.
One remedy to the inherent errors caused by network gaps is to look at your business from a whole accounting perspective. For instance, how do you know that you are running a profitable business if you only look at your sales reports? The whole picture lies in the general ledger with financials such as Salary, Profit and Loss, and Expenses added in. There is a way to generate those reports along with your sales analysis at any point in the day, month or year.
Wireless-dedicated accounting software from Canadian-based CellSell has been around since 1991 and receives serious praise from independent dealer clients throughout North America.
CellSell is an ‘integrated accounting’ software that merges front office sales and carrier activations with inventory and back office accounting. The result of a fully automated, singular system is that it eliminates the need for 3rd party software like Quickbooks, Peachtree and Excel used in conjunction with a separate POS. It also eliminates the need for the poor finance person who has to extract all those data and reassemble them for accounting purposes. The benefits to CellSell’s system start from the front end and works toward the back with an unalterable audit trail linking the collaborative network together.
One of the many benefits to bringing this type of a collaborative network of numbers in one package is that checkout time with a customer is cut down immediately. CellSell allows a customer invoice, for instance, to be generated at the carrier activation level and all of the information is entered only once. There is full consolidation between the carrier site, the POS and the accounting, which turns your front counter clerks into covert data entry clerks for back end accounting at one entry point.
Everyone talks about customer experience as if it was about products and service, which may have merit, but in reality it’s about how long he or she has to wait in line and how long you keep him or her in your store, regardless of how friendly your counter staff is. Once the purchasing decision is made, that customer wants to ‘get in, get it done and get out’, nothing personal. But how do they do that when your sales are taking nearly thirty minutes to complete per new activation and they’ve been in line for twenty already? Their customer experience could hurt your return business rate.
Worthware Systems International Inc., CellSell’s parent company, designs and implements leading accounting solutions specifically for the wireless industry. Dino Gaspari, CellSell’s Director of Business Development stated, “The complete back-office accounting platform integration with the retail and front office is seamless and transparent to sales associates. As part of the basic implementation, the general ledger chart of accounts is pre-configured and validated by management in advance to allow for financial reporting in compliance with GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles) and to prepare the system for reliable, predictable, accurate point-of-sale transaction data processing, by either the sales associates, or the POS checkout clerks. Cellsell accounting systems platform is a Human Resource Manager’s dream. Bookkeeping personnel can either be eliminated or transitioned into new, more productive roles within the organization. Instead of wasting time and money trying to map their numbers back and forth, from separate POS and accounting packages, bookkeepers, controllers and financial department personnel, can all focus on analyzing their numbers instead of massaging them.”
Their website, http://www.cellsell.com, is an in-depth picture of the company and its valuable products. What are most interesting however, are the videos of the customers themselves who talk about CellSell’s value to their businesses. While one retailer has reduced time with each customer from 30 minutes to 15 minutes with CellSell, another retailer claims the product helped bring his company to a whole new level.
CellSell could be the answer that your retail chain is looking for to fully integrate processes currently over-wrought with redundancy, inaccuracy, or that lack real-time reporting and reliable data. Collaboration is in the numbers.