Stepping into 2015!

We wish all of our clients a wonderful and prosperous New Year.  We are excited about our development schedule for the coming year.  This year we are directing our attention to providing you with better tools for customer management. Scheduled for release this year:

• Loyalty Program – A new Loyalty module will be available in the next release.  Multiple plans can be supported. Points can be assigned based on dollars or units purchased, and flexible reward programs are supported including dollars off, percentage off as well as one free item for every so many purchased. Points can be redeemed at POS or through data mining. While plan activity can be reported to the customer (from the POS display and optionally on the receipt), silent plans can also be run to prevent redemption at POS. Contact sales for more details.
• Spouse Identification – Target promotions to the partner of your customer including the ability to select either the customer or spouse based on gender.  This is especially helpful for stores with joint accounts and customer records.
• EMV & Mobile Wallets –  Mobile wallets such as Apple Pay and Google wallet will be supported in the next release.  In addition, we expect to be early to the market and on time for the EMV mandate in October providing the best security by combining EMV Chip and Pin with full end to end encryption.
• Data Mining – Sales Orders and Loyalty plans are being added to the current data mining tool to provide additional flexibility in contacting and targeting your customers.
• POS Corrections – A new suite of utilities will be added to POS to greatly simplify correcting previously posted sales including: transaction reversals, changing customers, changing associates, as well as the ability to remove errors (and their offsetting corrections) before generating customer statements.
• Sales Receipt Drill Down – This new function adds the ability to view POS Sales receipts on the screen from either the Reprint Prior Receipt function or from the Customer Profile for a specific customer. Full SKU and tendering details are provided and transactions can be browsed forward and backwards.
• Customer Statements –    An option is added to include the Vendor name (Web Description) to the statement detail by Vendor Type to provide additional clarity while providing a facility to not report Web Descriptions for specific vendors.
• Vendor Fulfillment – Vendor returns will be distinguished from corrections for improved returns analysis including a great new Vendor Fulfillment Report to identify rates of returns, completion, over-shipments, substitutions, late and early shipments as well as receipts without a purchase order.
• Open to Buy Export – The Open to Buy export has been redesigned not only to operate more easily, but with additional capabilities to separately report sales returns, markups, adjustments, transfers, and returns (depending upon the capabilities of the planning service).
• Windows 8.1© – While Merchant Plus will be able to run on Windows 8.1©, but many of our device partners have not yet provided device driver updates.  Very few clients will be able to use it at Point of Sale.
• Mobile CRM – A major initiative this year is to extend Merchant Plus to mobile devices. Our initial release is focused on customers – not just profiles, but action lists that can be assigned to associates for followup such as upcoming birthdays, anniversaries, inactivity, recent sales, etc.  This is a longer term project and represents our path to the next generation of Smyth Retail software.

With the exception of the Mobile project, these features are included in the next release (version 5.1) which we expect to be deploying this summer.  There are too many great changes to list here – watch for our release notes when Merchant Plus! version 5.1 is available.