It started with a conversation about the weekly wage bill.
The owner of a suburban newsagency sat down with his accountant in early 2024 and did something he’d been avoiding: he calculated exactly how many hours per week his team spent on tasks that, in his words, “a computer should be doing.”
The number was startling. Between manual stock counting, placing reorders over the phone, reconciling supplier invoices against what arrived, and running end-of-day reports by hand, his team was spending close to 12 hours per week on administrative work.
“I had a part-time staff member who was essentially just managing paperwork,” he said. “That’s a real cost. And it was hiding in plain sight.”
The tasks that eat retail hours
For most newsagents and small format retailers, time haemorrhages in predictable places:
- Manual stock counting: walking the floor with a clipboard to decide what needs ordering.
- Phone and email reordering: calling suppliers, chasing confirmations, checking deliveries.
- Invoice processing: PDF invoices that someone manually keys in line by line.
- Reporting: end-of-day and weekly reports that take time to run and rarely surface clear insights.
- Backup: waiting for it to be done at the end of each day.
None of these tasks requires skill or judgement. They require time. And for a small retail business operating on tight margins, that time has a direct dollar cost.
What changed
After switching to Tower Systems software and configuring it for this business, four things changed.
First, automatic reordering. The software now monitors stock levels in the background and generates a replenishment order when levels drop below a threshold. The owner reviews and approves it — which takes minutes — rather than generating it from scratch each time.
Second, AI-powered invoice processing. When a supplier PDF invoice arrives, the software reads it automatically and converts it to an importable format. What previously took 20 to 30 minutes per invoice now takes under two minutes.
Third, AI report insights. Rather than reading a dense sales report and trying to identify patterns, the AI insights button surfaces specific observations: which categories are up, which are down, what’s trending, what needs attention.
Fourth, end of shift backups ended thanks to cloud backup.
The combined effect: 8+ hours per week recovered. These were hours the owners was paying for in wages.
The broader opportunity
For newsagents specifically, the efficiency opportunity is larger than in most retail categories. High transaction volumes, multiple supplier relationships, and tight margins mean that small process improvements compound quickly.
A typical newsagency can cut invoice entry time bay at least 5 hours a week. At $35 an hour cost, that’s $9,100.00 a year in savings!
What this doesn’t mean
Automation doesn’t replace the value of an experienced team member. It removes the tasks that waste their time, which means they’re available for the tasks that actually require a human: serving customers well, building relationships with regulars, and managing the unexpected.
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