Workorders, Growth, FreshBooks, and Shopify: Developer’s Update

Justin Laing on November 15th, 2009.
Posted in New Features.

I would like to take a few minutes to tell you about what we are working on currently, and what we have coming up.

Workorder Redesign Continues

I’m continuing to work on the workorder redesign that we started at the end of summer. After we released the new workorder interface we got feedback that people need to be able to edit workorders outside of the sales process. Mechanics stay late or work when the shop is not open. They need to be able to edit workorders without being attached to a register/sale. We heard you and we are bringing the new workorder interface into a view that will be accessible outside of the register just like the old workorders. This should be available within the next few weeks. And there are more features/improvements to come: customizable statuses and quick add menus.

Prepared For Growth And The Holidays

We spent a good amount of time improving our infrastructure and ability to scale over the last few months. We feel good about our new capacity now and believe we are ready for the next years worth of growth.

FreshBooks, Shopify, SmartEtailing Integrations

FreshBooks: Nate is putting the final touches on an integration with FreshBooks (a web based invoicing application with 800,000+ users). Our hope is that FreshBooks users that also have retail businesses will like the idea of a point of sale / inventory control system that integrates with their web based invoicing system.
Shopify: Nate is going to be starting on an integration with Shopify (an easy to use, ready to go, ecommerce platform). The integration will synchronize your MerchantOS inventory and customers with your Shopify account and bring orders done in Shopify down into MerchantOS.
SmartEtailing: We are in the final testing phase of our integration with SmartEtailing. If you use SmartEtailing as your ecommerce platform you will soon be able to synchronize your MerchantOS inventory with your web store and download sales from your webstore into MerchantOS.

Some Exciting Catalog Improvements

Master Item: These tie together items from different vendors that are actually the same item. This allows you to compare prices for a single item from multiple vendors. It will also let you see substitute items (if we have the information from the vendors).
In Stock Information: We have in stock information from a number of large bicycle vendors (we’d love to add more so ask your reps to integrate with us). You will be able to see if these vendors have the items you are ordering in stock from your preferred warehouse.
More To Come!: We have some killer ideas on how to use our catalog database to help you save money and time. And now that we have Nate here busting out some killer code we have the time to work on them.

Your Requests

We are listening to your requests. Every time you request a feature or fix we record it. We look over these requests and try to do the ones we think will improve the system the most. If there is something that you’ve requested but we haven’t gotten to and it’s been a while feel free to request it again. It will let us know it’s still important to you. We can’t get to everything but we will try to get to as much as we can (without making the system overly complicated).

This Blog

We’ve been talking a lot lately about how we can better communicate with our growing community of customers. One thing we are going to try to do is keep you informed more about what is going on through this blog. Please leave comments below!

About MerchantOS Point Of Sale

MerchantOS is a point of sale and inventory control system. It keeps track of all your sales, customers, inventory, purchase orders, work orders, and more. It's got all the features you'll need to manage your retail business packaged in an easy to use and intuitive design.

How does MerchantOS improve my business?

Fast and efficient point of sale. Quickly handle special orders, layaways, work orders, deposits, refunds, store credits, gift cards, credit card transactions and more. All from the point of sale without making the customer wait.
Inventory control - we pre-load supplier catalogs for you. This makes creating a purchase orders easy because you don't have to type in product descriptions.
Real time in-stock information allows you to check to see if you have an item in stock or back ordered from anywhere. This information is updated in real time as sales are made and inventory is checked in.
Customer relations management. We keep track of all your customers, their purchase history, special orders, layaways, work order history, credit accounts, gift cards, and more!
When a customer comes in asking about that special order you'll be able to give them fast and accurate information.
Work Orders and service management. Create a work order for the customer and track it to completion. Lookup previous work orders for the customer.
There are many more features in MerchantOS but the most important is ease of use. It won't take you long to get comfortable with the system and if you do need help we are a phone call or email away.

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Bradley Saul
November 16th, 2009 at 12:28 pm

Hi ya’ll, Great work!
Regarding the workorder system, it’d be great to have a user friendly scheduling and calendar interface to more easily see what is scheduling on a given day. Plus, a rule to bump the due date of overdue workorders would be cool. Plus, an automated email that automatically sends the customer an email (or text message) when they’re workorder is finished – automated messaging would be a killer feature for other things too like special orders.

My last request: more CRM features or CRM integration. Basically, I’d like a way to have more control over customer data – manage email lists, manage tasks related to customers, etc. Our current workaround is to use the register and create a new item for “tasks”, but it’s pretty sloppy. If you could integrate with Daylite like Lightspeed, you would have the best retail business solution EVER. You’re already pretty close!

Justin Laing
November 16th, 2009 at 1:02 pm

We do plan to integrate with a couple different CRMs. We haven’t decided exactly which ones but our initial thoughts are: Highrise, SugarCRM, and Sales Force. We are also looking at integrating with MailChimp and Zendesk.
We would like to get some sort of calendaring functionality going at some point. But that might be out further in the future.

Bradley Saul
November 22nd, 2009 at 11:34 am

Yes vote for Mailchimp.

Highrise is simple, though pricey. Salesforce is probably the most powerful but WAY more complicated than most small businesses can manage.

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