Even though every business that trades performs certain basic functions, there are literally thousands of different ways in which those businesses are organised and those basic functions are performed.

To a large extent, those differences derive from the type of market the business serves. What is appropriate for a retail pharmacy is different from what is appropriate for a wholesale supplier of electronic components.

For each type of business, there are a range of software packages that assist with accounting and administration, and none of these packages can serve every type of business equally well. That includes our product, SELLmatix, and understanding the design considerations behind it will help you determine if our product is a suitable "fit" for your requirements.

The basic accounting functions used by trading businesses involve:-

• Sales processing
• Inventory
• Stock Purchasing
• Debtors Ledger
• Creditors Ledger
• General Ledger with Profit & loss etc.

All these systems affect the others. For example, Sales can result in changes to Debtors ledger, Inventory and General Ledger. There are three ways of dealing with this:-

• Fully integrated systems track entries all the way through automatically. Selling a packet of potato chips will automatically update everything including the Profit & Loss, and Balance Sheet. Such systems, are very difficult to set up, and require expert knowledge to maintain, no matter what anyone will tell you.
• In am modular system, different functions are handled in different ways. Cash Registers are a classic example of a modular system, and a few totals from the different subsystems are posted into the other systems. This is the simplest and easiest way to implement a system.
• Hybrid systems integrate certain heavily used components. For example, where POS is used to automatically integrate with Inventory, but Creditors and General Ledger are handled separately.

The most frequent mistake made in implementing systems is to try and automate too much at one time.

Retail, not Wholesale
Most computer based accounting systems are designed for wholesale businesses, and include the modules listed above, integrated in some manner. Staff using these systems need to be well trained, and complete integrity of the transactions is more important than processing speed.

For example, before an item is sold, it must be in stock, before it can be received into stock it must be ordered, the delivery must match the purchase order, and the amount on the invoice must match the price on the purchase order, etc. This of course is a very simplified explanation, and ignores things such as backorders, quantities allocated, shipping and so forth. These complexities are the reason that when ordering from some suppliers, it takes a lot of time and work by the person processing the order while they "fight with" their computer system. This is the "wholesale" business model, and other products are better suited to these requirements than SELLmatix.

SELLmatix is designed for retail businesses. The type of business where a customer walks in, selects items from the shelves, takes it to the cashier, presents payment and expects to walk out the door with their goods and a minimum of hassle.

In a wholesale business, if a stock receipt has not been recorded into the system, the clerk can spend time correcting the problem and entering the information necessary.

In a retail operation, that is not an option. Waste the customer's time, and they will go elsewhere. You need to process the sale, take the money, and later make any correcting adjustments that may be necessary. This is an area where a lot of wholesale accounting systems that are marketed as retail systems fall down.

Retail Niches
Processing of sales is very similar in most retail outlets, which is why Cash Registers with very limited functionality have survived for so long. Different types of retail businesses have different back end processing requirements, however. For example:-

• Newsagents and magazine resellers usually do not order their magazines. The publishers/distributors just send the magazines, and they always send more magazines than the retailer will actually sell. At the end of the week or month, the retailer returns the unsold copies and pays for what has been sold. Magazine returns are a very big back office issue for these retailers.
• Pharmacies in most countries have legal requirements relating to prescription medication. These requirements vary from country to country and state to state, but the front end sales processing is very similar to other retailers.
• Grocery Retail has special requirements for specials, shelf labeling and frequent (usually weekly) price changes, however the processing at the checkout is similar to other retail operations.

Of course there are many other retail niches where sales at the checkout are similar, but back end requirements vary. For each of these niches, there are usually a number of POS systems tailored to suit, but their strength lies in the back end functionality required by that niche, and the POS processing is often weak.

SELLmatix Positioning
SELLmatix was designed as a Retail Sales Processing system, and can be used in two ways:-

• As a Point of Sale system which is can track inventory if required, where a single controller can maintain up to 64 POS terminals. In this mode, totals produced by SELLmatix can be posted to various other accounting systems as required. This is more than enough for most retail requirements, and is far simpler than trying to integrate systems such as creditors and general ledger.
• As a Point of Sale front end to other fully integrated back office systems. There are many ways in which data captured by SELLmatix can be extracted and used by other systems, and many ways in which SELLmatix can be updated from other systems. In such cases we keep SELLmatix as a general purpose POS system and prefer to assist other developers to provide the features unique to their market.

Over time, the functionality has grown, and will continue to do so. From time to time, it is necessary to add "hooks" which are needed for some integration projects. In such cases we do this in a manner that does not impact other use.

Some retailers that do not want full featured back office accounting, do however require a limited subset of the features, and in a number of cases we have added some of this type of functionality. One example is the recording of stock deliveries and stocktake figures at the point of sale. Such features while useful to some retailers, should not be seen as an alternative to a full back office implementation using purchase orders and a creditors ledger.

As the developers of other software written for large clients requiring full integration, we recognise that back office accounting needs to be heavily tailored to country and vertical market requirements, and we prefer other developers to integrate SELLmatix and service these niches.

Our philosophy with SELLmatix is to have the product serve a broad market at low cost, while enabling more specific integration.

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