The role of a head office is to generate and send the information to the constituent retail outlets to ensure that a retail chain uses common standards to classify and code its items. Therefore, the classification and coding of items are kept consistent across all stores for consolidated reporting on their performances through timely reports. Shoper 9 HO allows you to centrally create/ export masters and these masters are updated at all Shoper 9 POS locations. Shoper 9 HO also lets you to:

•   Define the business rules for the retail chain
•   Define the schedules for data updation activities at showrooms
•   Create vendor information
•   Define the constituents of the supply chain network
•   Provide the configuration to transfer data to external applications like Tally.ERP 9
•   Consolidate the stock requirements at POS locations and place purchase orders
•   Communicate the distribution plan to the concerned parties
•   Define discount and offer plans for the POS stores to follow
•   Control the pricing of the items through periodic revisions

The ability to generate reports that take into account data from many POS locations is another key business benefit that Shoper 9 HO provides its users. Consolidated reporting enables dynamic MIS reports generation and better control over POS stores operations. The HO also holds the repositories of the POS transactions data.

Shoper 9 POS is a versatile Point of Sale (POS) application which can manage all the operations at a retail outlet or at a distributor's place. The Shoper 9 POS application has two flavours – Retail and Distributor, which can be installed as required.

The Retail application is used in a store/showroom which sells products/services to walk-in customers. The Distributor application is used by warehouses/stockists which sell/despatch goods on wholesale basis to retailers. The fundamental framework of POS is common in these two flavours and many options are similar. The Retail flavour is tuned for cash and carry business processes while the Distributor flavour is tuned for packing/despatch/invoicing business processes.

There could be single stores, stores owned by a single business but selling different items or stores that are part of a large retail chain. Shoper 9 POS can be used in all these scenarios. All major operations of Purchase, Stock, Sales and Barcoding are supported. The master data can either be entered or imported from other sources. Sales promotional schemes and discounts can also be created.

When installed as part of a large network of stores, the centralised control of the POS application is achieved using a Shoper 9 HO application.

One of the main reasons for Shoper 9 POS’s popularity is its extremely responsive billing system. This function ensures a quick turnaround of customers at the billing counters. Additionally, the amount of data entry work is reduced by the use of text file import

The Shoper 9 POS application has extensive reporting options that are useful to the store manager and the management. It has a comprehensive interface to send inventory information to Tally.ERP 9 for the purpose of generating accounting, inventory and statutory reports.

Shoper 9 as a product is designed to handle high volume of SKUs (items) and transactions. It offers effective and flexible merchandising options to ensure smooth functioning of any retail business.

Purchase

Stock ordering and receiving processes are handled elegantly by Shoper 9. The options cater to the needs of centralised or localised processing. Also, reports are available to ease the verification processes.

Stock

SShoper 9 has versatile features to handle efficient stock management. Options include inwards, outwards, transfers and even management of goods in transit.

Sales

Options for cash and credit sales as well as sale of goods and services are available in Shoper 9. It allows handling complex sales schemes in a hassle free manner.

Shoper 9 Retail Solutions suite is designed to manage large volumes of data. To achieve this, Shoper 9 uses different masters/ catalogues comprising of data and appropriate business rule definitions.

Catalogues are used to store all the relevant data that is used as reference.

The product related masters store all information related to the items being handled. Details pertaining to each SKU and the item classification information related to different combinations of item hierarchy like Product/ Brand/ Style/ Shade/ Size are also stored in masters.

In the case of Shoper 9 POS, discounts and schemes, tax details, currencies that are allowed at the POS, vendors, customers, sales persons, etc. are catalogued independently.

In the case of Shoper 9 HO, information related to retail outlets, vendors, showrooms, geographical locations of the distributors, etc. are catalogued. HO allows cataloguing of various schemes and discounting rules that need to be applied across the chain apart from the tax details and the currencies that can be used for transactions at each outlet. Once catalogued centrally, it can be distributed across the network. The information regarding all the stores in the business group is catalogued at HO, which takes care of restrictions on Goods Inwards and Outwards from each location. For each activity, the configurations used to set up the required environment for that particular business is also catalogued for reference. All data communication details like back end data import, data synchronisation and Tally posting are stored in their corresponding masters. The scheduling of data communication activities are taken care of by different scheduler catalogues.

Business requirements and needs vary and in all likelihood no two business would be alike in all aspects. The ability to fine-tune the retail solution to suit a business need is one of the most important success factors of a software product. Shoper 9 supports out-of-the box capability for configuring and running the solution as per the business requirements/needs

Shoper 9 suite of products can be configured and setup in different ways to support varying business needs and scenarios of different retail verticals like textiles, apparels, accessories, electronic goods, etc. Properly configured, Shoper 9 can ensure that the various workflows are managed in an effective and efficient manner, reducing errors, increasing customer satisfaction and optimising business effectiveness and efficiency. For example, the workflows to be followed for transactions like Sales invoicing, PO, Goods Inwards, etc.

Some of the common capabilities which can be configured in Shoper 9 include defining or setting up:

• Item Classifications
• Secrity
• BarCodes and Lables
• Printing Formats
• Database Management
• Backup/Restore
• Migration
• Stock Number Generation Methodology
• Document prefixes to be used by various transactions

Based on the requirement of a retail business, the basic data that needs to be captured during the recording of transactions can also be configured. These configurations enable quicker and easier preparation of catalogue information for components like customer, item master, etc. Data communication between different business constituents is also flexible due to the use of rules for stores which includes defining activities and schedules through the relevant components.

Shoper 9 supports high levels of flexibility and configurability of interface with Tally.ERP 9. It can be configured to interface with other third party applications used by the business entity.

Shoper 9 offers out-of-the box integration with Tally.ERP 9 with Tally.ERP 9 taking care of all the accounting, statutory and financial needs of your business. The interface is achieved by defining a correspondence in Shoper 9, named mapping, between the companies in Shoper 9 and respective companies in Tally.ERP 9, mentioning all data transfer rules.

The process is comprehensive enough to be configured by any user and data transfer is set up as a part of the routine logical data updation process, the synchronisation. The configuration required in Tally.ERP 9 is simple with minor changes to its “.ini” file and its company features. Data from Shoper 9 then flows automatically to Tally.ERP 9 at scheduled intervals. Shoper 9 also supports a simplified process of posting this data manually on demand, using a single-click interface.

This interface automatically creates and synchronises requisite masters in Tally.ERP 9. This ensures that inventory and financial aspects are managed separately in the respective applications. The best part is that mapping can be created from one Shoper 9 company to one or more companies in Tally.ERP 9 as well as multiple companies in Shoper 9 to a single Tally.ERP 9 company. Even a change in the master details in Tally.ERP 9 will not affect the mapping and the interface continues to work. The mapping can be configured to transfer transactions of showrooms so that they can be distinctly identified in Tally.ERP 9. A major aspect of mapping is the purchase tax breakup transactions supported in Shoper 9. This transfer the tax breakup to Tally.ERP 9 as required in statutory reporting in some states. Yet another advantage is the creation of HSN codes for items as required for statutory compliance.s

Shoper 9 also provides utilities required to modify company information, mapping and masters.

A retail business will generally have multiple entities which interact in a cohesive manner with each other. These entities include retail stores, distributors, vendors, factories, warehouses and the head office, and these collectively form a supply chain network. Between the various entities of the supply chain network, there can be flow of information, material or both.

Shoper 9 provides a flexible framework for managing this information as well as material flow between the various entities. Business rules can be defined centrally at the head office and this information can flow to all the applicable entities of the chain, providing a high degree of visibility and control over the operations.

At the highest level, business entities in Shoper 9 can be categorised on the basis of geographical attributes like country, zone, state and city. At lower levels, it is possible to categorise the entities based on the business requirements. Apart from this, you can specify unique attributes of each of these entities like statutory information, mailing information, business operations permitted, etc. as a part of the definition.

Data communication protocols, data sharing between these entities and interfaces permitted can also be configured for each business entity defined.

The process of consolidating data of a retail business is necessary to understand its performance, manage various operational aspects and plan for the future. Shoper 9 as a retail solutions suite provides extensive reporting capabilities as an out-of-the-box feature. Apart from this, specific user customisation requests are supported.

Reports in Shoper 9 are broadly classified into sales, stock, stock registers, cash, MIS, aging, outstanding, comparison, consolidation, purchase order related, customer related, etc. as relevant in each flavour of Shoper 9. In each case, accessibility to reports can be controlled by menu weights and user weights. Users have the flexibility to define the scope of the report. Reports can also be exported to various formats, if required. Various reports can be generated size-wise for analysis.

In Shoper 9 HO, reports can be configured to be generated from closed, on-hold and operational showrooms as per the user’s requirements. These reports can be viewed either in a report form or in a spread sheet form. Additionally, the report filter configuration can be saved and it can be recalled in the same or similar reports for all or specific users. HO generates a set of reports that consolidate the data from various showrooms/stores that come under its control thus helping in performance analysis of the complete network. It also has the capability to generate the reports which will give the data synchronisation status, POS activities such as database backup, database restoration, master data loading, etc. Also, Shoper 9 HO has capability to generate all the Shoper 9 POS reports with the AST Modules installed. In all the flavours of Shoper 9, reports can be exported to various formats like HTML, Spread sheet, CSV, RTF, etc. and then can be mailed. The Tally interface module enables the customer to take advantage of the Tally reporting features.