The 2023 Business Tech Conference (BTC), ADD’s triennial user conference, included many sessions showcasing ADD Systems’ latest software enhancements and best practices to help clients run their businesses more efficiently than ever. In this blog series, we share some of the key sessions held at the event.
Our first two parts of the BTC Education Series focused on SmartConnect and Pegasus, our web services gateway and mobile service/HVAC tool, respectively. We want to transition to our enterprise software application for home and back office convenience store operations, ADD eStore. If you’re in the convenience store industry and want software covering all aspects of your business, eStore will be your software solution.
How eStore Enhances Your Operations
The convenience store industry moves fast, and with many facets and decisions to consider when running an effective c-store. With so many decisions needed, c-store owners need software that can cover all business aspects and help simplify their operations to make them more efficient and profitable. This is where eStore becomes an invaluable tool. You can think of eStore as a Swiss Army knife for your business that can track, analyze, and manage your sales, purchases, and inventory.
“eStore is utilized for accounting, inventory, pricebook management, and, really, anything in your day-to-day operations,” ADD Systems Application Specialist Ryan DiCamillo said. “Your entire gas station and convenience store business can be managed with eStore.”
Besides giving you more control over your business, DiCamillo also mentioned how eStore streamlines home office and store-level processes, giving your front-end employees more time to focus on the floor.
Control Your Pricebook More Than Before
At the end of the day, you need software that helps make your business more profitable. To maximize your earnings, your pricebook needs to be set with proper guidance and direction. At the heart of eStore is a centralized pricebook that helps you maintain your bottom line.
“eStore’s pricebook is aimed at a really high degree of control from a single home office location or a set of employees,” DiCamillo said. “We have a ton of tools that the pricebook module gives home office control over what’s happening at the store level. It keeps the pricebook organized and up to date providing a high level of profitability on the items that you sell.”
Users can take advantage of pricebook features to improve their operations, such as target margins with user-defined groups and tags, retail price rounding, parameter-based mass changes, and multiple vendor support. Many rote tasks, such as pricebook changes, can also be automated through vendor EDI and spreadsheet updates, giving your managers and workers more time for other important tasks.
Better Continuity with Your Vendors
Having a solid working relationship with your vendors is essential for c-store success. When you can manage your vendor purchases effectively, sales velocity improves, leading to increased profits. eStore’s centralized pricebook and vendor management help you manage your c-store more effectively.
“With the pricebook set,” ADD Systems Application Specialist/Customer Support Representative Dawn Garity-Gross said, “you can control what items are authorized, which helps you control the inventory you want in your store. It also helps keep the vendor accountable for pricing. When that invoice comes in, eStore informs them if that’s expected pricing.”
Garity-Gross also mentioned how eStore allows invoices to be sent electronically, allowing both the c-store and vendor to avoid paperwork, stay organized, and save time in the billing process.
Modern, Efficient Shift Report Management
Any c-store manager will tell you that there are many work tasks to juggle. Whether keeping a watchful eye on the coffee and food service, checking in deliveries, or working with customers, these tasks take time throughout the day. With eStore, shift report management becomes more efficient, giving managers more time to focus on other jobs that need addressing.
“Using eStore’s shift report management feature speeds up managers’ workflows,” Garity-Gross said. “It helps organize shift reports and keep them all in one place.”
The shift report management takes advantage of automation, like many eStore features. Sales data, such as what was sold and collected, are automatically imported from the POS, saving managers time from manually keying in any numbers. With so many numbers to add, subtract, and consider in the store, automating these aspects is a time saver. It also prevents human error from being presented in calculations.
Use eStoreScan for Lottery, Audits, and More
Having a scanner that serves multiple purposes is essential in today’s c-store industry. Scanning for inventory audits, invoices, and price checks empowers the store manager, but scanning for lottery adds another layer of versatility. eStoreScan, ADD’s mobile scanner, can keep track of your lottery inventory, tracking each pack and calculating sales and automating your lottery over / short for improved accuracy.
eStoreScan becomes even more efficient when paired with the latest Android technology. Compared to older types, Android scanners have better connectivity, scanning abilities and battery life. It’s a mobile enterprise handheld computer with the modern cell phone form factor.
“Our Android scanners and enhanced lottery features bring a huge benefit to c-stores,” Garity-Gross said. “It takes the whole manual aspect of tracking lottery away. They no longer have to keep track of all that manually and do all those calculations. It’s just click, click, click of a scanner.”
Intuitive Reporting with Atlas
No matter your role in the c-store industry, the ultimate goal is to help grow your customer base and increase store profits. To help keep you informed if you’re within your profit margins, setting competitive prices, and have an overall holistic picture of your performance, you need software that helps cut through the noise and lets you not just see, but fully understand your business operations. When you understand the full picture of whether something is increasing or decreasing profits, informed, actionable decisions become available to drive your business forward. This makes ADD Systems’ Atlas Reporting the perfect pair with eStore.
“Atlas is where they’re getting that information to make those decisions. eStore is feeding the data, but Atlas is where you’re getting all the analysis and information on what’s selling great, what has a bad margin, and what items we are consistently running out of,” Garity-Gross said. “We see our retailers increasing sales of particular items. Based upon Atlas Reporting, they found they kept running out of a certain item three days into the week. It was a good seller for them, so they were losing money by not having enough of that product, and they determined that all through Atlas Reporting.”
Convenience Store Software Driven by Customer Feedback
As with all of our products, ADD Systems takes pride in having software developed through customer feedback. Our eStore User Group, an active network of eStore users, offers an invaluable collective client voice. We understand that partnering with many c-store professionals ultimately makes the best product. Helping to improve our customers’ business operations by making them more efficient and profitable is what drives us to make the best c-store software.
If you’d like to learn more about eStore, please get in touch with us by email at sales@addsys.com or by calling us at 1-800-922-0972.
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