The small business software experts at Intuit and Revel Systems, a San Francisco-based mobile point-of-sale (POS) software provider, are making it easier for salon owners and grocers to ring up sales.
By now, it’s becoming fairly common to pick an item off the shelf or to order a meal and complete the purchase right then and there without having to trudge all the way to a cash register. In a bid to improve the customer experience, merchants and businesses of all sizes are turning to mobile devices like Apple’s ubiquitous iPad to eliminate checkout lines.
Building on a previous collaboration, Intuit and Revel joined forces again to create the QuickBooks Point of Sale for Salon and Grocery solutions.
Intuit and Revel then turned their attention to the next two largest verticals, and the new products were born from that collaboration. Rather than a simple rebrand of existing products, the companies looked at what sets grocers and salons apart from other small businesses and adapted the technology to suit their needs.
In QuickBooks POS for Salons, for example, features include automated appointment reminders. Business owners can also schedule appointments directly in the POS system, and they can assign employees to specific bookings. Salon workers can also include charges for add-on products and services to individual appointments, and they can set per-employee commissions on products sold.
“On the other hand, we designed QuickBooks POS for Grocery, powered by Revel Systems, with an in-depth inventory management system that allows small business owners to know which items are stocked,” John Shapiro, director of product management, at Intuit’s Payments division, said.
Additionally, the new offering provides “clear prices for products sold by weight, as well as support for integrated scales to seamlessly calculate prices.” The product also supports price-embedded barcode labels for weight-based items so that the proper price displays when items are weighed and scanned.
“With the new QuickBooks Point of Sale for Salon and Grocery, small business owners can still process payments and keep the lines moving even if during a power outage,” Shapiro said. “The system saves transactions offline and instantly uploads them to QuickBooks when small business owners can reconnect to the Internet. That gives today’s small business owners both the ability to continue taking payments and the confidence that comes from knowing their business can withstand even the smallest outages.”