Microsoft®Business Solutions Retail Management System Headquarters helps you compete more efficiently and reach greater profitability. Designed to provide head-office managers of small, multi-store businesses or chains a complete view of their business, Headquarters provides flexible tools to help you easily roll up and manage the data for all stores from one primary location.
A typical deployment of Retail Management System in a two-store scenario—one store with multiple lanes. A local area network(LAN) connects Store Operations installations across checkout lanes or POS stations within the store, and an Internet connection connects the stores to a head office running Headquarters.
Inventory Control and Tracking Microsoft Retail Management System Headquarters controls and tracks inventory at each store and for your entire chain of stores, helping you know what’s selling and what isn’t selling. You’ll be able to increase your inventory turns while keeping inventory at an optimal level and purchasing from the lowest-cost suppliers. With it, you'll have the ability to:
Track detailed information on quantity in stock, reorder points, and restock levels for each item at each store. Invoke automatic inventory replenishment at the home office, and for any set of stores. Set up a master inventory database and download it to any group of stores. Information on item types, departments, categories, suppliers, substitutes, aliases, parent relationships, and more can be replicated to stores for consistent stock identification. Program sales tax individually by store per local regulations. Promote inventory balancing by managing stock transfers among stores. An inventory transfer log tracks stock movement. Designate selected stores as warehouses where inventory can be received and redistributed. Perform inter-store quantity checks so you can determine the inventory levels at all stores. Whenever stores upload their information, the quantities in Headquarters are automatically updated.
 Purchase Orders
With the Purchase Order feature in Headquarters, you can reduce your cost of doing business by better managing your supplier relationships. It helps you in identifying what must be purchased, recording all purchases, and printing purchase orders (POs) for all your stores. You can also:
Generate POs for selected items by quantity sold during a certain period of time to quickly replenish the items that have been sold during that span. Generate POs for selected items when they fall below reorder points. Use the Min/Max inventory capabilities to easily create an order that brings your stock to an optimal level for your business. Perform inter-store inventory transfers from the warehouse store. Send the POs to each store for individual receiving, or send a combined PO to one location (such as a warehouse) for central receiving and later disbursement.
Pricing, Sales, and Promotions
With Headquarters, the head office can have centralized control over item prices chain-wide, by region or for each store.
Put selected items on sale at specific stores or across the chain of stores. Set up special pricing for items, categories, or departments, and then broadcast as desired. Program price changes to take effect immediately or during a specified time period.
 Sales Tracking
Headquarters maintains highly detailed data from every transaction across the chain, providing you a top down view of what’s selling and where. These include:
Keeping detailed information on invoice numbers; items sold; as-sold prices; tax collected; customer, cashier, and sales rep IDs; and applicable serial number or matrix information. Maintaining detailed sales and profit analysis, sales commissions, and tax reports. All are easily generated. Tracking special transactions from each store including Work Orders, Back Orders, Layaways, and Quotes. Compiling comprehensive data collection, which supports data warehousing and OLAP
Customer Management and Marketing
Headquarters can keep a complete profile of every customer who ever bought from any of your stores, enabling you to provide superior customer service while learning your customer’s habits. With the information you collect, you’ll be able to create more targeted and cost-effective marketing campaigns.
Track demographics, preferences, purchase or problem history, account balance, and credit information. Keep chain-wide buying habits, shopping frequency, and purchase amounts readily available at the head office. Take advantage of Headquarters customer data to help you create thorough and accurate database marketing and relationship selling to targeted customers. This data can be exported to sophisticated CRM and ERP applications. Keep detailed account receivable data for each customer, and allow your customers to make on-account purchases and payments at any store in the chain of stores. Send consolidated monthly statements to your on-account customers that contain transactions and payments from across your chain of stores.
Employee Management
Headquarters monitors sales reps, cashiers and their hours, and the registers they run, helping you manage your labor costs much more effectively.
Upload attendance records for computing hours and labor cost at the head office. Centrally compute sales commissions based upon sales transactions and commission structures found in associates’ profiles. Review detailed and summary sales reports that can be grouped by cashier or sales rep to give you insight into how each employee is performing.
Powerful, Flexible Reports
The powerful Headquarters report generator offers instant, flexible access to a wealth of meaningful data to help you view vital business information the way it makes sense to you.
Generate consolidated reports to show sales breakdowns, identify slow-moving items, and check sales for any day—by store location, items, departments, categories, customer, or taxes. Allow reports to be previewed on screen, printed, or exported to other Microsoft Windows®–based software packages. Customize each report by hiding or displaying additional information, changing the group levels, and sorting the data just the way you like it. Then, “memorize” the report so your changes will remain the next time you’d like to view the report.
Advanced Security Features
Headquarters incorporates tight security to restrict employees’ access and changes to sensitive information to keep your business data secure.
Take advantage of 31 security levels that protect screens and fields and report writing—every sensitive corner of your system and confidential data. As an extra level of security, grant or deny users access to Maintenance Mode, a special operating function that must be ON for a user to change, edit, or delete Headquarters data.
Opening New Stores
Headquarters allows you to get a new store up and running with a new Store Operations database in a quick, cost-effective manner. Once one store has been created and configured as you like, quickly roll a new store database to other locations with little setup and configuration required.
Easily create a Store Operations database for the new store by exporting data from an existing store and the Headquarters database. Spend time setting up the store—not the software—by using the exported Store Operations database, which already will contain every item, customer, tender, tax, etc.—everything your store needs to be operational from day one.
Integration with Other Software and Hardware
Headquarters works with other industry-leading software applications you’re familiar with, helping you get up to speed quickly and reduce or eliminate duplicate data entry.
Microsoft Office System products such as Excel and Word. Microsoft Business Solutions applications like Microsoft Business Solutions—Great Plains® and Small Business Manager. It also works with a wide range of point-of-sale peripherals, including printers, magnetic stripe readers, pole displays, scales, and bar code readers.
System Requirements and Other Information
System Requirements
Use any PC-compatible system running Microsoft Windows 98 SE, Windows ME, Windows 2000 Professional Edition, or Windows XP (all versions). It is recommended the system have a Pentium 500 MHz or faster processor, 8 GB of available hard disk space, and 256 MB or more of RAM.
Purchasing and Installation
A Microsoft Certified Partner will work with you to purchase and install Microsoft Retail Management System. Microsoft partners are trained professionals who have retail industry experience. They are certified to sell and install the system.
Training
Based on reports from customers and partners, basic training for cashiers and employees takes anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. Additional training options are available through your Microsoft partner, and interactive Courses are available through Microsoft.
Technical Support
An optional support package is available to give you access to Web- and phone-based technical support from Microsoft and free software upgrades for the first year of ownership.
|
