Integrations That Boost Productivity

“Expand your business”, “fuel growth”, “reach more customers”. It can feel a bit salesy, and it can certainly be overwhelming. If you download every app in every appstore because they say they’ll help your business, you’ll end up spending a lot on apps and making very little use out of any of them. But with a targeted approach to an AppStore, you can find lots of amazing tools that can great things for your business, so long as you use them correctly.

Don’t believe it? Well, today, we’re going to look in detail at just a few apps that are designed, not just to make you money, but save it. An integration from the Epos Now AppStore that boosts productivity will let you save money on payroll, save time in your work, improve efficiency, and, ultimately, focus your teams energy back on customer service and sales.

The apps and integration types we’re going to look at include:

• The Bulk Import spreadsheet tool

• Flow’s automation app

• Workforce payroll management

We’ll also look at

• Other popular Epos Now apps

• How the Epos Now AppStore works

So if you’re ready to get your business running like a well-oiled machine (metaphorically speaking. Your POS does not need oil!), read on and learn about some amazing business tools!

Bulk Import Spreadsheet Tool

Bulk Import is an Epos Now App that allows you to import and export your data to and from spreadsheets. The ability to edit your business data in spreadsheets has the potential to save enormous amounts of time on large tasks, as well as letting staff and managers view information in the spreadsheet format, which many businesses find useful.

For instance, say you’re adding a new product line to your business, like a clothing store that’s made a deal with a new supplier. Bulk Import would allow you to download your products list and add dozens of new lines, adding in all the information for each product on a row, making quick duplicates and adjusting for colors and sizes, and then reupload that information to Epos Now.

But Bulk Import’s application goes far beyond that. In fact, it’s limitations go only as far as your businesses needs. Industries with large inventories can do huge changes far quicker than they otherwise would. Spreadsheets have many amazing features that simply cannot be replicated on a point of sale back office, which is why the Bulk Import app is so useful:

Using shortcuts like control+f or control+h to find and change your product list quickly is fantastic. Getting rid of a product line? Filter for that category, supplier, or the names of those products, and tick the delete column. Poof! They’re gone. Need to edit customer data? There’s a download for that, too.

Ultimately, the Bulk Import app can save both managers and staff a lot of time on tasks, boosting productivity in a big way. Stock takes, data input and searches, price changing: none of it takes nearly as long when you can use a spreadsheet to do it.

If your business has a small product list, or doesn’t spend too much time on these sorts of tasks, it may not be necessary. But the download is there for those moments when big changes happen, or you have a big task ahead. And that’s something lots of businesses experience regularly, making Bulk Import a key weapon in the arsenal!

What Bulk Import can do:

• Download your business data and access it in spreadsheet form

• Load spreadsheets with stock, product, customer, category, barcode, and SKU focus

• Make changes to your data on spreadsheets and reupload it to Epos Now

Bulk Import can help you if:

• Your business regularly gets new products

• You have an extensive product list

• You need to make any bulk changes to products, prices, stock, staff, or your customer list

• You’d like to regularly complete a full inventory

Flow Automation

When it comes to improving your productivity, automation is key. Automate one task on your to-do list, and it never appears there again, leaving your free to focus on the others. Flow can scan your business data and help you complete tasks like few other tools. What’s more, it can do so at a certain time or according to specific rules that you can determine.

Say you want to run a spontaneous happy hour in your bar, ask Flow to lower only your drinks prices by 20% for one hour. Done! Just like that. Alternatively, maybe your products list is getting a little messy, so you ask Flow to archive out of stock items. Done! But Flow goes far beyond completing one-off tasks at speed. Flow can really come into its own with daily tasks. Say a bakery produces the same amount of stock in the morning. Flow can set stock levels on baked products to the same amount every morning so that bakery inventory stays accurate without anyone on your team touching a button!

Tasks that would otherwise take hours or be impossible because of time constraints become possible with the Flow/Epos Now integration. Flow saves time on admin, and let’s you and your team get things done without all the hassle of piling through long lists of products and prices. 

What Flow Automation can do:

• Make bulk updates to your business data

• Manage your products, inventory, and prices

• Spot and correct irregularities such as negative stock values

• Mark and filter customer accounts based on spending

• Correct typos and case errors in your business data

• Schedule menus and pricing

• Redact customer date for GDPR compliance

• And much more!

Flow Automation can help you if:

• You make regular or scheduled changes to your pricing, products, or inventory

• You want to tidy up your business data

• You want to save time on your admin

• You want to use something easier than spreadsheets

Workforce Staff Management

When it comes to boosting productivity, getting the scheduling and staffing right for your business is the most essential task. That makes Workforce.com’s staff management tool a crucial integration for any business.

Workforce offers you greater insight into your staff productivity which you can use to build a smarter rota based on collected sales data that helps calculate staffing requirements. After Workforce develops a potential rota automatically, you can make adjustments or use it to run your business for the week. As you trade, you’ll get live updates on staff performance, live wage insights, and an automatic payroll.

Using the Workforce/Epos Now integration, your staff never need to wait for a payment, you don’t need to burden yourself with hours of shift and wage calculations or admin. Workforce creates your payslips for you. All you need to do is send them!

If you’ve been burdened with admin and staffing headaches, Workforce.com could be the app for you. But more than that, Workforce is the means to a well-staffed business, ensuring you have enough hands to keep your customers happy and your business tidy, but not so many that productivity can dip. Getting your staffing right with tools like these is the key to a productive business!

What Workforce.com can do:

• Automate staff rotas

• Automate payroll and payslip creation

• Provide access to live shift tracking

• Help you with the administration of onboarding and offboarding staff

• Track legal hours, licensing, and training for all staff members

Workforce.com can help you if:

• You spend too much time creating rotas

• You struggle creating payslips and managing your payroll

• You’re not sure how may staff you need at different times

Other Popular Epos Now Apps

Epos Now continually builds its AppStore, adding new in-house and third-party apps to help users boost productivity, retain customers, and access new markets. The AppStore offers users the flexibility to run their businesses the way they’d like to. Here are a few more examples of popular apps within the AppStore.

Xero accounting

Accounting can be tricky for any business owner. Not every business has people on staff trained in accountancy, but every business needs to do it. Many opt to hire an accountant to help them, and those accountants tend to use accounting software like Xero, Sage, and Quickbooks. Epos Now integrates with all three!

The Xero accounting integration allows business data to flow automatically from Epos Now into Xero’s software, which can filter it into the relevant places. Payments owed and payments due get calculated quickly and easily, helping you understand your cash flow situation better. Invoice templates and purchase orders can all be created using the data from Epos Now combined with the tools Xero offers.

Xero is also designed to make taxes quick and easy, and your VAT return becomes less of a headache with an accountancy integration on hand.

With all of these benefits combined, it’s not surprising that accounting integrations are one of the most popular options in the Epos Now AppStore!

Epos Now Loyalty

An effective loyalty scheme is often a crucial part of any retention strategy. Offering your customers something back for repeat purchases and making them feel like VIPs every time they visit can boost spending enormously. Epos Now’s in-house loyalty program is designed to do just that.

The Loyalty app helps businesses offer tiered rewards based on customer profiles and memberships, award points automatically with every spend, provides additional customer analytics, and allows you to run your loyalty program both digitally and physically.

Combined, these tools help drive sales without demanding any additional work on the part of your team. Your loyalty program can tick along in the background, doing its job silently and effectively. 

Mailchimp

Marketing your business can be time-consuming, but if you want to maximise your sales, it’s essential. That makes marketing integrations with your POS system big time-savers that can allow you to do more with less.

Mailchimp offers businesses of any size the chance to win lost sales with abandoned cart emails, keep customers close with newsletters and mailing lists, and helps you refine your marketing strategy with engagement analytics that make it easy to adjust your approach based on what resonates with your customers.

The Mailchimp/Epos Now integration creates a secure and automatic link between your Epos Now customer database, including spending habits, memberships, and contact information. This means you can quickly create emails using Mailchimp's templates, then send them to the right customers for targeted, more effective marketing that leads to better relationships with your customers. All in all, this makes the Mailchimp app a valuable tool for any business!

How the Epos Now AppStore Works

Epos Now’s AppStore is only accessible to Epos Now POS users, and can be found through the website, or the point of sale back office. The AppStore is equipped with a search function if your know what you’re looking for. Alternatively, you can search for certain types of apps through the categories menu, which includes areas dedicated to accounting, CRM, ecommerce, food delivery, payments, and much more.

Each app has its own details page which tells you what you need to benefit from the app (for example, the Mailchimp app is only useful if you have a Mailchimp account), as well as how the app can benefit you. The pages also have options to download the app. Some apps are free, while others will require you to set up payment for the app and take out a subscription.

If you’ve found an app you’d like to try out, or just want to take a look at what the Epos Now AppStore has to offer, why not give it a visit here!