QuickBooks Keeps It Simple For Small Retailers

QuickBooks Point of Sale 4.0 takes any standard Windows-based PC and turns it into a combination bar-code-scanning cash register and inventory-control database, said Emily Mencken, senior product manager at Intuit, Mountain View, Calif.

The vendor also designed a channel program around the new offering, called the Retail Solution Provider Program.

Simplicity for both the retailer and the solution provider is at the heart of QuickBooks Point of Sale, Mencken said.

"What Point of Sale really is, is a bundle that sets up not just the cash-drawer system, but also installs the software and driver for a receipt printer, a bar-code scanner and credit-card swiper," she said. "We asked a lot of small retailers what they wanted from us, and it wasn't better accounting software. They said, 'We need something that helps me run my whole store.' "

Once the QuickBooks Point of Sale software is installed, resellers, or even the retailers themselves, can begin loading the inventory database by scanning the bar codes of individual product types and then adding inventory volumes of each product, Mencken said.

The information can also be added by cutting and pasting inventory data from existing spreadsheets.

For a typical small retailer, inventory loading takes less than a day, and Intuit recommends specific, low-cost, durable scanning equipment that can be ordered through the vendor and that has the appropriate drivers already preloaded on the software, she said.

Like the scanning gear, a specific type of receipt printer is also recommended by Intuit to match the preloaded drivers in the software. QuickBooks Point of Sale accommodates either a standard PC monitor or a touch-screen display.

The credit/debit-card swiper and back-end merchant account processing for QuickBooks Point of Sale is handled by QuickBooks Point Of Sale Merchant Services, a transaction processing service provider based in Calabasas, Calif.

However, retailers that already work with a bank-card or credit-card processor can continue to use their current merchant account and swiper and just enter the approval code into the POS terminal, Mencken said.

QuickBooks Point of Sale does have some limitations. The software is not compatible with Macintosh PCs and cannot provide alerts related to the expiration dates or shelf lives of certain inventory, such as dairy products or produce, she said.

"We don't handle perishable inventory," Mencken said. "That's a pretty darned complex type of inventory," Still, solution providers with software expertise will soon be able to make their own improvements to the package. Intuit is beta-testing an SDK for the POS solution that's expected to arrive by mid-summer. And the Proadvisor Program is already in full swing, Mencken said.

The POS package and Proadvisor Program received high marks from William English, owner of English Management Solutions, an IT consultant based in San Diego. English said his company already has had great success selling QuickBooks Point of Sale.

English said about 50 percent of his new QuickBooks Point of Sale customers were referred to him through the Proadvisor Program, which costs about $550 to join and requires a system certification.

In return, English can outfit his small retail customers with a complete cash-register and inventory management system that plugs right into Intuit's other business accounting programs, and save them thousands of dollars in the process, he said.

The price of a basic QuickBooks Point of Sale deployment starts at about $1,500 for both the software and hardware. Multistore versions of the product with all the bells and whistles are priced from about $2,000. Proadvisor partners receive a 40 percent discount off MSRP.