From POS to Ledger: Faster Payments, Cleaner Reconciliation in Business Central

First of all, I hope you’re all having a good day, and you’re going to have a better day, because today we’re going to go through doing point of sale effectively in Business Central using our Counter Sales application. One of the things we want to focus on is the integration aspect. A lot of people we talk to are using an existing point of sale solution that’s integrated into Business Central, and the challenge there is those transactions: trying to reconcile what’s happened in the point of sale with Business Central. Counter Sales deals with that because we’re built into Business Central.

But before I get ahead of myself, let’s look at the agenda for today. We’ll cover a little bit about who we are and what Counter Sales can do for you, and then we’re going to look at the software and its various aspects.

If you have any questions as we go, feel free to enter them in the question box in the GoToWebinar panel, and I’ll do my best to answer them during the session or at the end. Depending on how fast I talk and how many questions there are, it’ll probably take 45 to 60 minutes to get through this today.

About Insight Works

Very briefly about us: we primarily work through our reseller partners. If you have questions about pricing or anything like that, we publish some of our pricing on our website. If you need a specific quote for your environment and your existing Business Central partner is one of our resellers, they’ll be able to help you out. We actually have over 800 resellers now; this is a slightly older slide. They should be able to arrange a demo and all that sort of thing if you need it. There are also tons of videos online, which I’ll point you to at the end.

We do a lot in manufacturing and distribution, like warehousing, so you don’t see much on the retail side here, but we do a ton on the retail side as well. Really, anytime you’re touching physical inventory, that’s where we get engaged, whether that’s manufacturing it, warehousing and distributing it, or selling it over the counter.

The nice thing about that is if you have a retail outlet and you’ve got a warehouse and distribution centers, we can handle that full chain, everything from shipping from the DC to your stores. If you’re just a single small retail outlet and nothing else, we can handle that as well and provide you tools based on this big pile of applications to help you run that store.

Free Apps

As part of this, we have a whole bunch of free apps, and these are worth looking at. I’m not going to get into them in a ton of detail, and we’ll cover some of them in a moment. Take planning: if you want to do purchase planning for retail or distribution, the Enhanced Planning Worksheet is free, and it does a very good job of replenishment planning for your store, your warehouse, or both simultaneously, plus forecasting if you want to do that.

The green ones are more utility-type apps, like if you need to print barcodes. Down at the bottom are the ones that really apply to retail, like Doc Extender, where we can drag and drop documents. If somebody emails us a PO or whatever, we can drop it in and it stores it in SharePoint. We’ve got a nice record, and even people who don’t have access to Business Central can go to SharePoint and find those documents pretty easily.

OrderShip Express is a great tool for retail outlets because it runs in Business Central. You don’t have to use external shipping software to generate your shipping labels, get your rates, or get your tracking information. All of that’s done in Business Central right from the sales order or the sales order shipping screen. That’s beautiful for retail, because you’re mostly selling over the counter, but once in a while you might need to ship things, or maybe you’re shipping a hundred packages a day. No problem; OrderShip Express will do that for you. The application is free, and another good thing about it is that you’ll get discounted rates from carriers like UPS, USPS, FedEx, and Canada Post if you don’t already have a contract with a carrier. So it’s a double benefit: discounted rates and free software, and it takes about 10 minutes to set up.

Then WMS Express is barcoding, and not just barcoding, it’s mobile scanning. We can scan text almost as quickly as we can scan barcodes, so even if you don’t have barcodes, you might be able to do all your inventory counts, receiving, and so on just by scanning EPC codes or item numbers printed on the packaging. WMS Express lets you do inventory counts and receiving in the stores, and picking if you’re in a warehouse or distribution center or have a back parts area you want to pick from. Again, that’s free, and it runs on a phone or a dedicated scanner-style device.

The Retail Ecosystem Around Counter Sales

What we really want to talk about today is the retail side of things, and that starts with Counter Sales. You need a good point of sale system to run your retail environment, and Counter Sales is our point of sale solution. The nice thing is that it’s built into Business Central, so all of the inventory management, all of the transactions, and all of the payments are right there. You don’t need to synchronize with an external system or an external payment network, or do a bank rec to figure out what you sold through your point of sale. It’s all there in Business Central. That’s really the key, and we’re going to spend most of our time on it today.

But that’s not all you need to run a retail environment. You need a good point of sale, but how do you manage inventory? How do you count stuff? How do you get stuff out the door? That’s where some of the other solutions come into play. Now we’re talking about a full ecosystem for your retail environment from Insight Works and Business Central.

Starting at the top, some of these are a little more advanced, like the Product Configurator. Maybe you sell configured products. Maybe people come in and want to buy a Happy Meal and you need to choose the different components going into that kit. Well, maybe not a Happy Meal; maybe you’re configuring computers, furniture, or bikes. The Product Configurator can do that as part of Counter Sales or separately, and build out that kit and price it for you automatically. That’s a nice tool to have in a lot of environments.

The Enhanced Planning Worksheet, as I mentioned, is free, and it really simplifies purchase order creation because it tells you exactly what you need to buy based on your stocking levels or your demand. With the Forecasting Worksheet, even if you haven’t set minimum and maximum stocking levels for your products, it will figure out what you’re going to sell and tell you what to buy to meet that expected demand. Between the automated purchasing and the Forecasting Worksheet, which is also free, you’ve got everything you need to maintain the right stocking levels in your store to meet customer demand.

Once you’ve purchased everything and it comes in, that’s where you might use something like WMS Express. Counter Sales does have the ability, inside Business Central, to scan product in as you receive it without a secondary device. It makes it very quick and easy with a little USB scanner: you scan your packages and receive them directly into Business Central with what we call the receiving worksheet. But if you want to use a mobile device for receiving and scanning barcodes, WMS Express is free. You can use a phone, but you’re better off with a dedicated scanner, and those aren’t expensive anymore; a rugged scanner is cheaper than a phone.

With that mobile device, you can do receiving, and you can also do your inventory counts. Every time you need to do a cycle count or a full store count, you walk around with a scanner, go beep, beep, beep all over the place, and reconcile all of that inventory in Business Central directly. We also have Advanced Inventory Count, which I’ll talk about in a second, and it makes store counts really simple. Especially if you have multiple stores, you can schedule counts and cycle counts for them automatically.

So we receive it or scan barcodes with WMS Express. Then when you need to ship something out the door, say somebody phones up and pays over the phone, you can get the shipping rates while you’re on the phone with the customer because it’s all in Business Central. You click a button, it tells you what it’s going to cost, and it gets you the label and tracking number with a few clicks. It’s extremely simple to get stuff out the door. If you’re in a distribution center supplying your stores, that’s when you’d use Dynamic Ship, which is a full-blown LTL and parcel shipping solution. But from a store, OrderShip Express is great.

The Order Fulfillment Worksheet is useful in higher-volume environments where you’re shipping out a lot of orders. It’s typically used more on the warehouse side, where you may be shipping a lot of product to stores or direct to customers. It automates your picking and shipping requirements, generates the picks for you, and tells you what you can ship. If you have an e-commerce environment where you get a lot of orders, the Order Fulfillment Worksheet looks at all the orders that came in, figures out which ones you can fulfill immediately, and generates everything you need to do that automatically.

And as I mentioned, Advanced Inventory Count makes it very simple to do store-level and warehouse counts together. The counts can be scheduled automatically and the count requirements can be broadcast to the stores individually. It’s a very capable solution.

Now the best part: the ones in green are free. If you have Counter Sales, you just plug these in and get all that additional capability at no extra cost. The ones in blue are subscription-based. Not a lot of money, but very valuable if you need that capability. I think almost everybody will want Advanced Inventory Count because it’ll pay for itself the first time you do a count, but it’s not necessary to be able to use WMS Express for inventory counts in the store.

So that’s the retail landscape as we see it: all the tools you need, along with the standard functionality you already have in Business Central, to manage your retail environment.

What Counter Sales Does

Counter Sales, of course, is the center of this. So what does it do? It actually has three options for the user interface. The one I’ll spend most of today on is inside Business Central, where you work inside Business Central and do your point of sale from there. There’s another option with a separate user interface that runs on a tablet or a point of sale touchscreen, with a cash register like traditional point of sale. But typically, you run Counter Sales inside Business Central.

I’m not going to read every bullet point here, but two of the key ones are at the bottom. The first is warehouse integration. Counter Sales is often used in professional retail environments where you have a professional salesperson at a parts desk or something like that, and they need access to everything in Business Central: purchase orders, vendors, and so on. One thing we often see is people come to the front counter, pay for the product, and then drive to the warehouse or the yard to pick it up. We have full integration there: they can pay for everything up front and be invoiced, but warehouse operations still work the way they normally do in Business Central, with the warehouse pick, warehouse shipment, or whatever you have set up, so the warehouse or yard personnel can grab the product and get it to the customer. That’s really nice and quite important in those environments.

The second is Counter Sales Service. If you have an in-house service department, maybe you’re servicing bikes or rebuilding alternators or whatever you’re doing, you can do service bookings and service work orders, which don’t require the Business Central Service module. It all runs within Counter Sales, and you can build up service kits and so on. It also leverages deposits, like if you need a deposit before you start an expensive repair, and handles all the payments inside Counter Sales with that service extension.

There’s more, though. For credit card processing, which I’ll show you some of today, we have a number of different payment providers, so you choose the one that works best for you. Some strategic ones are listed on the website, and more are coming all the time. Card present is what we typically see with Counter Sales, because you have a parts counter or retail counter where people want to pay by credit card, but we can also do saved cards, virtual terminals, and so on.

We also have gift card support. If you’re using something like the Shopify gift card capability, we can hook into that API. Or if you want to manage gift cards yourself because you have one or two stores, we support your own custom gift cards, and you don’t have to use a third party and pay their fees. It’s all handled within Counter Sales. And of course, there’s the cash drawer and everything else you’d expect in a standard retail environment.

Where Counter Sales Fits

Traditionally, it’s been professional retail, like a trade desk or a parts counter where I’m going to look stuff up. Or I’m selling appliances, and I’m not going to walk you up to a cash register and tap on a screen to sell you a washer and dryer. I want a more robust interface to generate documents, do contracts, and so on. That’s typically where we see it.

But I’d say most of our customers are actually traditional retail. They have a point of sale terminal, and people come up and pay cash or credit card. So we support both.

Another place where it’s widely used is phone order desks, because Counter Sales is licensed for unlimited users. You might have the retail side, but you might also have a phone bank taking orders all the time. They can do all the data entry into Counter Sales while taking those orders, with a simplified entry experience, and take credit cards over the phone. So phone order desks are another common use.

And again, there’s traditional retail, where you have a cash register, a receipt printer, a touchscreen interface, and a barcode scanner for selling your product. If you add all of this up, pretty much anywhere you need to sell something to a customer is where you might want to use Counter Sales.

The Counter Sales Role Centers

With that, let’s jump in and see what this looks like. I’m starting in Business Central, and this is what we call the simple order entry interface. This is the Business Central role center for Counter Sales, the simple order processor. We have the order processor and the manager role center as well. If you’re running inside Business Central, this is typically one you’d see. If it’s a little more advanced, where you need to look at purchase orders and dig into vendors, you might use the standard role center, which shows you more information. But because it’s standard Business Central, as long as I have permissions as this user, I can go in and look for anything I want.

Licensing and Shared Terminals

That reminds me, I’ll talk about licensing now. When you’re running this at the counter on a shared terminal, it uses a device license from Microsoft. That means if I have 10 people sharing the terminal at the counter, or a POS lane where 10 different employees might use it at any given time, I don’t need licenses for all those employees. I’m just licensing the terminal. Individual people don’t need their own licenses to use Counter Sales. If they already have their own Business Central licenses because they do a bunch of other things, they can use those, but otherwise you just need the device license from Microsoft to run the terminal.

That’s a good segue into how this is set up. You set up all the people as Counter Sales salespersons who can use that terminal. If I open this one up, the user ID is linked to my terminal; that’s effectively the name of the terminal. This is one of the users who has access to use it. In the Counter Sales setup, we’ve said they have to enter their passcode to use the terminal. So every time they go to do a transaction, they indicate who they are and enter their passcode. Even though it’s a shared terminal, we always know who performed the transaction or created the order.

Price Check

Now let’s see what Counter Sales can actually do. I’ll start with something simple: a price check. Somebody phones you up and says, “Do you have this in stock, and how much is it?” That could be at the retail counter or an order desk, or somebody could just walk up and ask.

When I open this up, it asks who I am, since I haven’t set that yet. I enter my passcode, and it pops up the price check. By the way, I have it set so I can use the terminal for about 30 seconds before it prompts me again. If I leave it idle for more than 30 seconds and try to do something else, it prompts me to log in again. You can control that.

On the price check, I can choose a specific customer to see that customer’s pricing. But let’s say somebody’s phoning and doesn’t have a customer account, so this will just be a cash customer. Then I enter the item number. This is standard Business Central, so I can search for “blue” and it finds everything blue. What I can’t easily do is search for “blue chair,” because the item is “chair, blue.” The standard Business Central semantic search is getting a lot better, though.

If I want more advanced searching, there’s the enhanced search within Counter Sales. You can hide or show any of these fields, and you’ll notice we can search on a ton of things, even item attributes. Instead of going to an item list and filtering, if I type “blue” here, it finds anything with a blue attribute. It makes life a lot easier. It even searches serial numbers: somebody says, “I bought something from you, here’s the serial number,” and I can find the item number that matches.

Typically, though, it’s going to be by description. I’m looking for a blue chair, so I do that search, it finds “chair, color blue,” and away we go. It tells me what I have in stock, what’s on existing sales orders, and all that detail. If I showed the FactBox, I’d get all the FactBox information as well. And of course, I can drill down into the item card from here. That’s why it’s nice from a professional retail perspective: I’ve got that breadth of information to draw from.

I should also mention the location filter. My default store here is the blue store, so that’s what it brings up. But I also have a set of locations I’m allowed to see, and if I select that, it shows me all the availability for the locations I care about. I can select the store I want to look at using this filter.

So I’ll choose the 1908-S, and it brings up the price, and down here it gives me my availability. These are my locations, which are set up per salesperson. This is my default location, but I can see what’s available in the warehouse and a couple of other stores: what we have on hand and what we have available. The availability accounts for outstanding sales orders for the item.

The other nice thing about the pricing is that it’s not the same as looking up the unit price in the item list. It brings in pricing from the price lists associated with the item, so customer-specific pricing, volume-specific pricing, and so on. When I choose 10 or more, I get a 10% discount on this particular product. That’s much nicer than just looking up the unit price.

Now let’s say the customer on the phone or standing in front of me says, “That sounds good, let’s go ahead.” I just click to add, and that creates a new sales order for this customer with this product and quantity. Then I create the shipping documents directly in Business Central, slap the label on the boxes, and out the door it goes. Simple as that.

Starting a Sale

If somebody comes up to the counter to purchase something, there are a few different options for starting the sale. One is a new sales order, just like Business Central; this is a Counter Sales sales order, so it’s simplified. Or I can do a quick sales order, which is just a cash sale. I don’t care who the person is. And when I say cash, that can be check, credit card, or cash. They don’t have terms, and we’re not putting it on their account. I create the new sale, fill in what they’re buying, and off they go.

Tracking Cash Customers

If I care about tracking who the person is and what they bought, I’ll likely use this option. This is where, if you have a loyalty program or just want to track what customers are buying, you’d use it. We’ve all gone through it: “What’s your phone number?” I type in the phone number, let’s do 555, and I’ve got a bunch of customers with that number that I can find.

If I can’t find them and want to add them so I can track who they are, I can create a new cash customer. This doesn’t create a new customer in Business Central or a new AR record. It creates a new contact under my default cash customer for the current location. That means people at the counter can create all of these, in air quotes, “customers,” which are cash-only contacts, and we track all the sales history for those specific people. When this person comes in again, I can see exactly what they’ve bought from us in the past, and I can market to them.

Creating one is pretty basic. I just grab their name, and everything else is optional. Ideally I grab their name and phone number. If I can get their email address, I can market to them, track their sales history, do targeted marketing, and so on. It’s very easy to do from the counter.

The Quick Scan Interface

Otherwise, say this is the customer I want. I typed in his phone number, I hit OK, and it opens what we call the quick scan interface. This is a setting per user or per terminal. You’d use this interface when people bring products to the counter and you scan the barcodes to generate the sale. This is traditional retail: people drop a bunch of cans of dog food or cat food on the counter, you scan them in, and you take payment. There’s a different interface I’ll show you in a bit, but let’s use this one.

I’ll scan an item here. That item can be a UPC code, a custom barcode, really anything you’d like, and we bring up the item from Business Central. We can show the picture, and you can hide or show any of these panels.

Frequently Bought Together and Related Items

Down here is something interesting: frequently bought together. It looks up past sales history. Every time we sell this item, we typically sell these as well, and it gives the average transaction quantity; every time someone buys one of these, they often buy two of those at the same time. That’s similar to what you’d see on Amazon: you choose this item, and it suggests these two items because they go together. That’s built in, generated automatically on the fly, and tracked.

There are also related items, where I can manually curate a list of items related to this one that maybe aren’t bought together but might be substitutions or upsell potential. So I can curate that manually or have the system generate the list automatically.

Let me scan another item that has a little more. When I scan this one, you can see a lot more comes in that people buy together, like a conference table. This is all Microsoft demo data, so it might not make a ton of sense, but it automatically figures out what’s typically bought together and brings it in for you.

Tracking Lost Sales

Now let’s say I brought this item in and the customer says it’s way too expensive. I can just delete it, but there’s an option where deleting it automatically pops up this window, which lets me track why I’m losing sales. It’s an option you can turn on or not. I could say I lost the sale because it wasn’t in stock, so the user indicates why we’re removing the item from the order. Then you can report on this right within Business Central with analysis mode and start looking at why you’re losing sales at the counter. You can enter comments and so on.

So we scan a couple of items to sell this person, and now we’re done and need to finish the transaction. I just hit F9 on my keyboard or use post and print here. We can do post and print or post and send, and there’s a setting that lets you choose which one is the default. You can also use personalization in Business Central to make post and send the default button if you prefer. Post and send lets you email the invoice or receipt to the customer instead of printing it. I’m going to hit F9, which is post and print.

Taking Payment

When I hit that, the payment options come up. I’ve got terminal, which is the credit card machine where people swipe or enter their PIN or whatever they need to do. I’ve got manual card, which is great for phone orders: I enter all the card details and take the payment over the phone. That doesn’t save the card or any information in Business Central.

There’s a third option that doesn’t apply to cash sale customers but applies to customers where you want to save their credit cards. For regular customers with a card on file, we can just pay with that saved card every time they order. Cash customers don’t have that option because they’re basically walk-ins.

We can also enter payments manually. If they want to give me $100 in cash for some reason and put the rest on their credit card, I can do that.

I’m going to use the terminal. I’ve got a terminal here, and again, we support a whole bunch of terminal types and providers; this is just one example. In Business Central, I hit terminal payment, and it comes up with the dollar amount. On the terminal itself, you can see it’s brought that amount in. All I do is tap. As soon as I tap, it processes, and it says payment approved on the terminal. In a second, we see that reflected in Business Central: it’s brought in the authorization number, processed the payment, and we’re good to go. Really simple.

Receipts and Printing

I hit OK because I’ve taken all the payments I need, and now it prints the receipt. The first time you do it, it takes a couple of seconds, which is standard Business Central; after that it’s instant. Normally this would have printed on the receipt printer, but I don’t have one hooked up, so I just generated the PDF. Using our PrintNode connector, we have cloud printing.

I’ve got it set up to print two copies of the receipt, one for the customer and one for the merchant. You can have a single copy or multiple copies, whatever you like. The receipt layout is just a Word template. If you want to put a different logo up there or change the look and feel, you can do that in Word. You edit the layout, and Business Central picks it up and uses it after that.

You can also print invoices. If you’re mostly dealing with on-account customers, you can set it up so they get an invoice instead of a receipt. Or maybe you never want to print receipts, even for cash customers, and you can set that up to print invoices instead.

Report Scenario Selection

I normally wouldn’t show this, but I will because it’s kind of cool. There’s a lot in setup, including this report scenario selection. I say that for a cash sale, I’m going to print the receipt and never prompt. But maybe sometimes I also want to print the packing list or shipping document, so for that one I’ll prompt. When it’s a cash sale, it prints the receipt and asks if I want to print the packing slip, because maybe I want to give it to them to take to the back to pick up the product they just bought.

For a customer on account who normally gets invoiced, we always print the receipt and prompt to print the invoice. I’d probably flip those two around, but that’s what you can set up. You can list any documents you want printed automatically with no user intervention, and they print to different printers based on your setup: the receipt goes to the receipt printer, the invoice goes to the invoice printer, and you could have the packing slip print in the warehouse. So you’ve got lots of options there.

Anyway, I’m getting sidetracked. To recap: if a customer comes in and you want to take their name, this is how you do it. If you’ve got it set to prompt for the user, and it’s been idle for 30 seconds or more, it prompts me. If I’m using it continuously, it doesn’t, and you have control over that. If we care about the customer, you choose the customer by searching or from the list, enter the items, and away you go.

Other Ways to Enter Items

If I choose Janice here, it comes up in the quick scan interface again, because I’ve got my employee set up for the scanning interface.

Item Lookup

Instead of scanning, we can also have the item lookup pop up automatically as soon as I start the sales order. There I clicked it manually. This is for more traditional retail. Maybe I’ve got a menu with 20 ice cream cones. I can have all of them listed here, tap one, optionally prompt for quantity, and it adds it to the order. It’s a much more visual way of selecting items if I don’t have barcodes.

The Sales Order

The last way is a traditional sales order. When I start the sales order, instead of going into quick scan or the lookup, it can just open the sales order, where I have the full capability of Business Central. This is a simplified view of a pretty much standard Business Central sales order. I’ve got all the details, my availability by location, frequently bought together, and so on.

Here I’ve also got the sales history for this particular person. This one happens to be a company, but even for a cash sale, I can see exactly what they’ve bought in the past. If they want to rebuy something, I choose what they bought previously, grab a few, and add them to the order right from here. That applies to cash sales for people who don’t have accounts in the system and to people with accounts.

Price Changes and Overrides

A couple of other things we can do in this interface. Let’s say I want to give this person a break on the price, so I give them a 10% discount. It pops up and asks why I’m giving the discount. I don’t have to enter a reason code by default, but I can have codes like price match, or “they were nice to me,” or whatever else. It also tells me what happens if I accept the price change.

I have an override code, so it’s not prompting me. If I didn’t have permission to change pricing, somebody would have to enter their override code, or a manager would have to bring up the sales order on their screen and change the price.

The other interesting thing is that my employee setup doesn’t allow me to see the margin. If you look at some of our other Counter Sales videos, it shows the new sales margin. That’s a setting that controls whether you see the sales margin. In professional retail, I might want to see whether this 10% discount is causing me to lose money or miss the margin I need. So you have control over price changes, you can restrict them to certain individuals, and we log every time a price is changed, whether I give a discount or enter a new price.

Parts Search

I’m going to jump to a different sales order. On this one, I’ve turned on one of the options for faster parts searching. If you’re in an environment like appliance parts or car parts, a lot of people come from the old green-screen terminals and are very keyboard focused. This is all keyboard focused for part or item selection.

I hit a hotkey to bring it up and start typing what I’m looking for, say 2019, and there you go: that’s what I sell for a 2019 Honda Accord. To add it to the order, it’s just another hotkey. I don’t have this one set up properly, because this item is from a vendor catalog and I don’t have it in stock, so it was going to create it as a non-stock item so I can sell it or take a deposit for it.

This parts search can be extended to anything where you’re dealing with multiple attributes in a hierarchical list. In this case, the hierarchy is make, model, description, year, and options, and we can filter down very quickly to the items you’re looking for.

Deposits and Payments on Account

One last thing on this order: you’ll notice this line is red. Red means that technically I don’t have it in stock. I might sell it anyway because I physically have it at the counter. But let’s say I actually don’t have it and want to order it, and to order it, I want to take a deposit.

I use take deposit, and this is not the same as standard Business Central prepayments. I can take as many deposits as I like with as many different payment methods as I like, so you can do a layaway where someone comes in every week and gives you $50 until it’s paid off.

In this case, I’ll take a $50 deposit on the terminal. It comes up with $50, I tap, it processes and says approved, and in a second it updates in Business Central. There’s my deposit against this order, and I can place my special order. When they come in to pay for the whole thing, I go to final payment and apply that deposit to their payment. These customers happen to be on account, so typically you wouldn’t take a deposit from them, but it works the same way.

On that note, if a customer has an account and walks in with their statement wanting to pay it off on their credit card, we can do that as well. We have a sales payment journal that lets you take credit card payments against customer accounts, or give refunds to a credit card. So you can use a journal and still take credit cards exactly the way I showed you on the sales orders.

Returns

I’m not going to cover returns in depth, but they’re pretty simple. There’s a return order wizard. I’ve got it set to time out, so I enter my passcode, open the return order wizard, find the original sale by invoice number or customer, hit OK, choose the items they’re returning, and refund that amount to the payment method they used originally.

If they don’t have the credit card they used for the purchase with them, I can still refund that card, and that’s actually the default. I refund the purchase on the credit card directly, even a partial refund, and they don’t need to present their card again. I can override that if I want to give them cash instead.

Daily Close and Cash Drawer Reconciliation

There’s a lot more. I wanted to get to the other user interface, but I’ll quickly point out a couple of other things. Daily close and cash drawer reconciliation are built in as well. You can review all the entries; there’s the deposit I just took. We track everything, even for a cash customer who walked in off the street and doesn’t have an AR customer record in Business Central. We can still take deposits, and we track all the payment entries.

What I really wanted to talk about were the daily close reports and cash register reconciliations. I won’t get into a lot of detail, but that’s typical in retail. You want to close the day and finalize all the transactions. Just as importantly, Business Central allows you to post in the past, and the daily close prevents you from posting sales into the past. Everything moves forward from there.

The cash drawer reconciliation lets you indicate your starting balance by quantity and your ending quantity, and it does the reconciliation for you and automatically posts any differences to the G/L. If you have to count your cash drawer at the end of the day, it takes into account all your sales for the day and your starting balance, tells you the difference, and posts it for you. So it’s a very robust cash drawer reconciliation and daily close process.

There’s also the payment journal I mentioned earlier, where you can take payments on account. Again, this is the manager role center, which is who would typically do these tasks.

The Alternate Point of Sale Interface

The other thing I wanted to go over quickly: this standard Business Central interface is great. You can dig around and get into anything you have access to. It’s great for sole proprietorships, where one person does everything, or for professional retail, where somebody has to dig around the system, do quotes, or whatever else. But if you’re traditional retail with a point of sale terminal run by part-time high school students, you probably don’t want to give them this, maybe not even the simplified interface.

We have an option for that, an app if you prefer. The Business Central mobile app on a tablet also works really well as a point of sale interface using Counter Sales, so you don’t necessarily need this, but it’s an alternative. It runs on top of our Warehouse Insight product, which gives you all the things I talked about earlier: scanning, inventory counts, receiving, and so on. It can run on a 10-inch touchscreen point of sale terminal and works very well, and it works exactly the same way.

I can search for a customer here, let’s do 777, and choose them, or I can just do a quick order. Somebody walks up, I tap quick order, and it starts a sales order. Typically in this environment, we’re scanning, so I scan. You didn’t hear the beep, so: beep. When I scan the same item a second time, it increments the quantity to two. I bring in another item, and I just keep scanning while it shows the total.

Once I’m done, I hit complete order or F9, and it takes me to payment. They’re paying the full amount by credit card; we have a very high tap limit on this card. I tap, it takes the payment, it’s approved on the terminal, and in a second it’s approved on the screen and we complete the sale. It prints the receipt or invoice or whatever we need.

If you don’t have scanning, you have the same ability as in the other interface to select items. I forgot to change the filter, but this would give me a list of all the items I’m set up to choose when I generate a cash sale, with pictures. I grab them, add them, and build up the sale.

This is the simplified sales order entry, and the beautiful thing is that it’s completely customizable. I can add FactBoxes, change what shows up, change what appears when I scan an item, and add details like frequently bought together on the side, all through Business Central. It’s a completely configurable user interface. The same goes for the Business Central interface, of course, which is completely customizable through development or just through personalization, so you can change how it looks and feels.

Summary

We had a bunch of questions; I was talking so fast. I might get to them at the end, or we’ll send an email out with the answers, because I’m running out of time. Let’s jump back into the presentation.

I didn’t even go into some of the ancillary things like barcode scanning and automated purchasing that you get along with Counter Sales to run that retail environment. There’s a lot there. Counter Sales can do everything you need; it’s as good as any of the point of sale systems you can buy and integrate with Business Central. And you don’t have to worry about the integration, because all of those transactions are live with your subledger and your G/L. It’s all in Business Central, even the alternate user interface I showed you for traditional point of sale.

Pricing and Licensing

What is it going to cost you? It’s based on the number of stores, and your partner can give you a more accurate price. The first store is full price, and subsequent stores are discounted. Unlimited users and unlimited lanes, all for one price.

There’s no additional software cost for any of the payment providers you use. For example, we have a connector for Stripe, which doesn’t do card present, and Stripe may charge for using their service, but we don’t charge you anything for whatever credit card provider you want to use if we have a connector for it. You can build your own connectors, or we can build connectors for other credit card providers.

For the terminals I mentioned earlier, there’s a device license. If it’s a shared terminal, you don’t need to license everybody using it in Business Central. You buy one license for the terminal, which I think is about $45, and you’re set. And if you already have a Business Central license, you don’t need the additional device license; you just use your own.

For implementation, we can do a fixed-price implementation project. It’s primarily training and assistance with configuration, and it gives you a fixed budget to get that setup done. I’d say about half of people implement Counter Sales on their own and just come to us for support. Ongoing product support is included in your Counter Sales subscription.

Wrapping Up

We’ll reply to all the questions that were entered via email. I won’t cover them today because I’ve run out of time. If you have any other questions, go to the website, where there are videos and documentation. Our knowledge base, which you can get to from the main website, has configuration and usage information as well. Everything you need is online. Or just ask Google, and the AI summary will tell you what you need to do. It’s all there.

With that, thanks, everybody, for attending. I hope you have a great rest of the week, and hopefully we’ll see you at Summit in a couple of weeks. If not, have a good week anyway. Thanks, everyone. We’ll talk to you later.