Show and Sell

An Activant Expert Article

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Show me the money

Enterprise software with advanced deposit and down payment tracking functionality allows you to set and track your customers' payment requirements throughout the lifecycle of a showroom order. So when a customer comes into your showroom and places an order for three bathrooms' worth of fixtures, you can quickly determine a payment plan, receive a down payment, and track when full payment is due and items are delivered.

To ensure that you stay on top of who owes how much and by when, use your software's advanced deposit functionality, including accounts receivable drill downs and down payment history inquiries. These reports help you analyze and track your revenue stream, identify accounts receivable deficiencies, and allow you to arrive at a down payment percentage that is fair to both you and your customers.

When both a contractor and his customers come into your showroom and place separate orders that are part of the same account, you can designate a builder's allowance to enable you to receive a budget from the contractor, then allocate those funds to any related purchases. For example, if an account has a $1,000 allowance associated with it, and the builder spends half of it on pipes and joints, your enterprise software solution would automatically reduce the allowance to $500. This way, when the customers come in the next day to buy fixtures, you can tell them exactly how much credit they have left and bill them for any overage.

If a customer wishes to return items purchased from your showroom, you can also transfer the rma credit to merchandise credit, which minimizes the amount of money you lose to returns, and ensures a high level of customer satisfaction.

Out the door

Tag and hold functionality within your enterprise software solution streamlines the process of managing large, multi-step orders by allowing you to receive a contractor's order in total at your front counter, hold the material in a staging area, and release it once payment is received. Tag and hold functionality flags items from the initial order as they are received, which prompts your warehouse workers to place those items in a staging area to await payment.

Since tag and hold works in conjunction with advanced deposits, you can easily track which items received payment, and allow only those items to leave your warehouse. Additionally, the combination of tag and hold and advanced deposit functionality enables you to customize a payment and delivery schedule to fit the needs of your customer. So, when a contactor supplying all of the plumbing materials for a home wants his rough-in material before the fixtures, you can use tag and hold to classify which items will be the rough-in material, then use advanced deposits to schedule payment accordingly.

Contractors often come into your showroom not to browse, but to order a specific list of items the homeowner has chosen. When this occurs, order entry functionality allows you to associate each item in the contractor's order with a specific room or location throughout the house. Once the order ships, your solution should print the specific location of the items on packing slips and shipping labels, which simplifies how your employees pack and ship the order, and gives your customers the value-added bonus of knowing which items are in which boxes.

By coordinating the financial and inventory management requirements of a showroom order, and acting as a powerful project-planning tool, the right enterprise software solution can turn your showroom into a dynamic sales tool that showcases the best products and services you offer. With a host of features from deposit tracking to tag and hold functionality, showroom functionality ensures that no combination of customer, delivery requirement, or payment schedule is too complex.

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