Beer/wine/liquor retailers: Keep profits flowing with help from Microsoft Business Solutions Retail Management System

For specialty beverage retailers like you, success depends on your ability to keep your shelves stocked with fast-moving, profitable items and on keeping tight control over your supplier relationships. Your customers need to know you have products they want — and that they won't be waiting in long checkout lines.

Microsoft Business Solutions Retail Management System gives you the point-of-sale (POS) and inventory management tools you need, so that you can negotiate the best prices and stock your shelves with profitable items. Speed up checkout lines — even on Friday and Saturday nights! — so that customers can focus on shopping instead of waiting to pay.

Specialty beverage retailers can benefit from Microsoft Business Solutions Retail Management System in the following ways:

• Simplify inventory tracking. Your beer-wine-liquor store has hundreds of items. You need to know what's selling and what's not, and Microsoft Retail Management System is customized to help you.
• Work with matrix and lot matrix methods
• Process credit and debit cards and complex transactions quickly and seamlessly

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Here's a checklist of seven key benefits for beer, wine and liquor retailers from Microsoft Retail Management System.

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1. Gain control of products, shelf space, suppliers

If you know which items are moving and which are not, you can make profitable ordering decisions and build effective, efficient supplier relationships. You can also:

• Establish realistic reorder points that help keep you from overstocking your shelves with products that aren't moving.
• Easily track and manage hard goods, soft goods and convenience items.
• Create customized shelf tags.
• Easily produce gift bundles and holiday packages.
• Automate your calculation for inventory replenishment based on accurate, reorder point/restock level or quantity sold.
• Support multiple suppliers for each item.
• Easily create purchase orders that reflect matrices you set up in your system.
• Track inventory with specifics such as weighed, measured or by bin.
• Simplify inventory tracking with serialized items and multiple serial numbers.
• Put items on backorder for future deliveries from the POS.

Creating New Purchase Orders is Easy

2. Give customers a great shopping experience

Your sales staff can learn how to process the most complex transactions seamlessly, and have access to complete customer information that lets them sell more effectively.

Microsoft Retail Management System also works with the Microsoft Office System, making it easy to create and deliver communications that connect you with your best customers. You can:

• Quickly access a complete history of purchases, payments and account information at the POS. Capture, show, or hide customer contact and demographics on the POS screen.
• Build rapport — and up-sells — using customers' buying histories. Accommodate partial payments and account payments. And suggest relevant up-sells, sale items, and volume discounts. Reprint electronic receipts to resolve disputes, speed rebates, and verify purchase dates and amounts.
• Accept multiple tenders, credit and debit cards, coupons, gift vouchers, and foreign currencies. Grant automatic discounts and differential pricing to special customers.
• Target your mailings directly to customers' special interests.
• Sell even when your network is down. Serve others while keeping a stalled transaction "on hold."
• Handle work orders, backorders, layaways, and quotes.
• Customized receipts and price labels with logos and promotional messages.

3. Improve employee productivity

Jump-start productivity with a solution that's easy to learn and use, yet lets you maintain tight control over information and inventory to protect data and reduce theft.

• Employees can learn basic POS functions in minutes.
• Lock out — or empower — any employee's access to sensitive data.
• Reduce shrinkage by automating inventory management.
• View and print daily sales reports and journals at the POS terminal.
• Know which employee sells best. Predict what days and hours to staff up — or cut back.

4. Use customizable management tools

Get help managing every aspect of your store. Along with automating the POS and inventory, Microsoft Retail Management System lets you set up pricing levels and promotions the way you want.

• Configure POS screens to display exactly the information your clerks need.
• Use flexible pricing structures for markups and discounts.
• Set up new sales and promotions — fast.
• Streamline buying with ordering levels, best-price suppliers, and automatic POS.
• Make wizards do your work. It takes just minutes to input new items, manage inventory and perform everyday chores.
• Have built-in security features based on your cashiers' security levels. Data fields can be hidden, view-only, or changeable.

5. Get quick, comprehensive reports

Take the lead in your relationships with your distributors. With accurate, timely data about sales, profitability, inventory and customers, you can know exactly what's selling best, who's buying, and when. Decide on a dime what to buy or mark down; and track return on investment (ROI) for marketing initiatives.

• Generate sales and inventory reports to help you decide what products you want to order from distributors.
• Track return on investment from your ads, mailings, promotions, sales, and discounts.
• Preview, print, or export data in multiple formats.
• Add logos and graphics to formal reports.

6. Get the benefits of centralized information

Want to send financials to your accounting program? Or sell through an e-commerce storefront? Microsoft Retail Management System can help deliver.

Built on the latest Microsoft technologies, this integrated solution keeps information moving smoothly across your entire business and connects easily with other applications, platforms, and peripherals, such as Microsoft Office. The solution:

• Works with the Microsoft Office System, making it easy to create and deliver communications that connect you with your best customers.
• Can be integrated with legacy systems, accounting or financial software, Electronic Draft Capture (EDC), credit card services, and e-commerce storefronts — with the help of a Microsoft partner and third-party solutions. It also can be integrated with all your business channels — in-store, catalog, phone and e-commerce — to provide a superior customer experience. You can ship and track orders online.
• Manages accounts receivable and it trades summary POS data with popular accounting software to eliminate double entry.
• Uses EDC to integrate with leading credit card services to reduce fraud and keyboard errors.
• Smoothly integrates Web sales from multiple sites with the help of a Microsoft partner and a third-party application.
• Uses the POS as a data collector for back-end Electronic Retail Planning (ERP)/Customer Relationship Management (CRM) applications. You can also work with a Microsoft partner to set up your system to enable PDA and mobile/wireless stations.

7. Grows with your business

Ready to open a new store? You can help protect your investment and keep the same software and systems as your business grows into multiple stores and retail channels with Microsoft Retail Management System. Here's a few things to keep in mind:

• You can add new lanes or stores to your system with minimal disruptions to retail service.
• A common point-of-sale platform that spans single or multi-store locations is offered through Microsoft Retail Management System.
• Add customers and products to your system, and flexible Microsoft SQL Server technologies let you store and manage virtually unlimited amounts of information.
• Invest in your business, not in IT support. Microsoft Retail Management System does not require an expensive IT staff to set up and maintain, and it adapts to meet specific retail needs. As your business changes and grows, your Microsoft Certified Business Solutions Partner can provide support and assistance with customizing, integrating, and scaling your solution.
• Count on Microsoft. Start a long-lasting relationship backed by one of the world's leading technology providers. Microsoft Business Solutions is a family of connected applications and services for small and mid-sized businesses, with years of experience delivering business applications and services known worldwide for top quality.