CategoryPOS Software

Tower Systems is grateful to work with a diverse and engaged mix of charities and community groups through providing charity shop  / op. shop software.

Our work spans local op. shops, charity shops, community group shops, church bookshops, community groups with online shops and more. It is a diverse pool of businesses / shops / community groups we serve with our charity shop  / op. shop software. The diversity helps in that it opens our eyes to more opportunities for service.

We were surprised when first approached years ago by a community group and, then, thrilled to discover that our specialty retail PO software has facilities embedded in the software that serve the needs of charity shops, community retail businesses and the quintessential Aussie Op. Shop.

Our op. shop software , opportunity shop software, charity shop software helps these businesses, these community run and community serving businesses, to run more efficiently, accurately and successfully.

We are used to dealing with committees and boards of management as software is assessed and consideration given to the needs of the shop in the context of the charter of the community group or charity. We offer to software the software multiple times so that all stakeholders are able to see what they need to see in order to make their own assessment.

From tracking inventory, rewarding shoppers, understanding sales performance and helping volunteers run the business, this POS software for charity shops and opportunity shops helps local charities in their mission of service. The software can sell items by barcode, inventory product code, price point grouping, description, PLU code or more. There is flexibility as to how a charity business tracks what it sells . This flexibility serves the data, time management and financial management needs of the business.

This op. shop software / charity shop software / social enterprise retail management software serves in a diverse mix of situations and offers facilities backed with flexibility. Indeed, this is what it is – social enterprise POS software made for the charity sector.

We can organise to show this software to those sunning the charity shop, the board or committee. To arrange this and tell us more about your needs, email: sales@towersystems.com.au or call 1300 662 957.

Australian made. Australian supported. We are grateful for people who shop local.

Accountants and bookkeepers are often asked for advice by retail business owners about which POS software to buy.

Unless an Accountant or bookkeeper has experience actually running the type of retail business, they may not know what the business needs in the shop. They will understand the accounting needs of the business, but what about the business operationally needs, the workflow needs, the specialty needs unique to that type of business?

Most accountants and bookkeepers we meet are accounting experts, not specialty retail operational and management experts.

Unless an accountant or bookkeeper has actually used the POS software they suggest how can they know if it is right for the job? Sure they will read about it and often talk to people about software from an accounting perspective, but this does not make them experts. Accountants usually know accounting software well, but not specialty retail POS software.

Good accountants and bookkeepers themselves use specialty practice management software to run their practices, to serve their customers. Why, therefore, would an accountant suggest a specialty retailer not use specialty software make specifically for they type of retail business? They shouldn’t. That’s right. In fact, they should suggest to their specialty retail clients that they use software for their type ion business.

Specialty retail businesses need specialty retail management software, software made for those businesses.

Bike shops need software made for bike shops.

Toy shops need software made for toy shops.

Homewares shops need software made for homewares shops.

Sewing shops need software made for sewing shops.

Game shops need software made for game shops.

Jewellers need software made for jewellers.

Firearms retailers need software made for firearms retailers.

Garden centres need software made for garden centres.

Pet shops need software made for pet shops.

Produce and farm supply businesses need software made for produce and farm supply businesses.

Fishing and outdoors shops need software made for fishing and outdoors shops.

Gift shops need software made for gift shops.

Newsagents need software bade for newsagencies.

Adult shops need software made for adult shops.

Accountant and bookkeepers need software made for accounting and bookkeeping practices.

Specialty retail management POS software provides opportunities for better workflow management, easier selling, better supplier connection and better service of customers. Bottom line: specialty software is more fit for purpose for specialty retailers.

Tower Systems only develops and sells specialty POS software in a selected number of niche retail channels. We are experts, selling expert software, to expert retailers.

While we like accountants and bookkeepers, and have a couple working full time in our software company, we think sometimes their advice to go with an generic simple POS package could be less than appropriate advice.

Tower Systems is grateful to help doll shops with POS software that serves the unique needs of their businesses. Made in Australia for local businesses, this software has facilities that go beyond what is traditional for retail POS software.

Our doll shop POS software helps doll shops better serve their customers. It does this in plenty of ways. We only realised when we were shown by experts in the doll shop retail space.

Here are some of the facilities in our doll shop POS software that we have been told are especially useful in these niche businesses:

• Repairs management. Doll shops often offer repair and care services. Our software enables the tracking of repairs including parts and labour tracking. It also maintains customer contact, to keep them up to date with when the repair can be collected. The flexibility of the repairs / workshop management tools is ideal for the nature of repair / maintenance services offered in doll shops.
• Club marketing and support. Embedded in the doll shop POS software are facilities that enable the business to serve the members of clubs with offers and pricing. This nurtures the love of collecting and showing dolls and better connects the business to this community, ultimately growing the size of the community.
• Special orders. With many dolls made to order or sold on a pre-order basis, offering facilities in the doll shop POS software for managing these types of orders helps the business to manage opportunities and to capture revenue in advance of having items to sell. This level on unique record keeping is key for the doll collector businesses.
• Serial number tracking. Yes, plenty of collector dolls have serial numbers. Tracking them from within the software offers a service that doll shops can leverage.
• Anniversary marketing. Collectors love their dolls. To many, they are a member of the family. Remembering anniversaries can help a doll shop maintain a connection with their collector customers.
• Rare visit loyalty.  The customer visit cycle for a doll shop is infrequent, patchy. Embedded in this software for doll shops are loyalty tools that respect this and encourage shoppers to provide more value to the business from each visit. It’s in doll retail where you see old-school loyalty as inappropriate.

Tower Systems is grateful to serve specialty doll retailers with our POS software, to help them run more successful and enjoyable businesses, to help them broaden the appeal of doll collecting and doll love.

Our specialty POS software is good at serving specialist retail business needs.

For more information: sales@tower ystems.com.au or: 1300 662 957.

Yes, it can!

Good POS software provides you with tools for checking / tracking GP% and thereby cross-checking to see if data errors have been made that result in inaccurate information as to the profitability of the business.

Our POS software helps mitigate against data errors by eliminating human touch of data as much as possible. However, not all human touch can be avoided, and this opens to possible data errors, which can play out to GP, business profitability reporting and, eventually, tax liability.

Our Tower Systems POS software helps small business retailers to identify and resolve data errors that feed an inaccurate gross profit reporting situation. Our help desk team also provide comprehensive support for any business chasing problematic data. Our retail business support team go further and provide help from an accountant perspective, where a issue may be revealed in the P&L – we work back to the source, which is usually inaccurately entered data in the POS where someone has not followed basic principles or, worse, someone has manipulated the processes to hide fraud.

We saw a situation recently where a local retail business using other software, not from us, was confronted by a tax bill that was considerably higher than expected. They had been trying to get help through the POS software company they were using. As that was not working ut for them, they sought our help. We showed how we track and manage GP fluctuation in our software and encouraged them to speak with their POS provider again, to ask for more useful help in getting to an understanding of what has happened.

Can your POS software help identify a gross profit problem in a retail business?

We are grateful to answer yes to this question – through our software, our help desk and our retail business support team.

POS software is only as useful as support provided by those who make and care for the software and its users. It is frustrating seeing a small business owner left with a challenging situation for which there should be answers in their business data, but, answers they cannot find for themselves as they do not have the requisite tools and knowledge.

Good software support is key for small business retailers using POS software.

The vape shop POS software from Tower Systems leverages specialty facilities that we are told by vape shop owners helps them run more successful and valuable businesses.

Here is a video we shop last week in which we discuss and look at some of the facilities offered by this vape shop POS software. See for yourself how this locally made POS software could serve the needs of your vape shop.

Our Vape Shop POS Software offers a range of facilities vape shop owners tell us they love. These are tools built to serve their needs and needs of businesses similar to their requirements.

Using our locally made Vape Shop POS Software you can benefit from …

• Systematically managing an age check at the transaction point. Being able to demonstrate that you do this in a strutted way in your Vape Shop POS Software can help when checked by regulators.
• Providing product use and other important notice information on receipts to ensure customers are fully informed.
• Customising product labels with information you want on there.
• Tracking the tastes of customers so that you can market to them if a new product emerges that may satisfy their interests, needs or tastes.
• Selling by fractions. With some products sold in less than whole number units of measure, our Vape Shop POS Software allows inventory tracking at the fractional level.
• Selling online through our Shopify link through which products managed in the POS software can be easily offered online through a beautiful website that is seamlessly connected to the Vape Shop POS Software for product details and images and with online sales details flowing back to the software.
• Tracking who sold what and when.
• Strong remote management tools for owners of businesses run under management.
• Strong audit tools through which we respect the importance of accurate business data and the need to track behaviour that may compromise the integrity of the business.
• Loading electronic invoices from suppliers.
• Structure. Ultimately, that’s what this software is about – structure, business structure through which the business can safely and consistently operate to the benefit of the business and those who work in it.

The Tower Systems Vape Shop POS Software is made for vape shops, built on already successful locally made small business retail POS software used in retail channels where regulation and adherence to regulation is key for the retail business owner, retail business staff and the regulators themselves.

Our goal is developing specialty retail POS software, like our POS software for vape shops is to help these specialty retailers to better serve and through this to be more valuable to the owners of the businesses and all who rely on them.

Our POS software for vape shops, made here in Australia by us, is feature rich for specialty retail.

Tower Systems serves more than 3,000 small business retailers across a range of specialty retail channels.

Tower Systems has been offering locally made repairs management software as part of its specialty retailer POS software for more than twenty years. the software it offers today is fresh, innovative and focussed on serving the efficiency and customer satisfaction needs of local small business retailers.

Thanks for wonderful advice from businesses offering repairs services, this software evolves to serve new opportunities.

See for yourself some of the highlights of this repairs software in this new short video that we shot in-house last week.

Integrated with the Tower Systems POS software, these unique and local business focussed repairs and workshop management tools are part of the software, not come add-on that you say extra for or that you rely on some other software company to support. being an integral part of the POS software helps make these repairs tools more valuable, more useful.

Made for jewellers and bike shops, these repairs and workshop management tools in our POS software are being used in myriad businesses today.

Some of the functions our specialist retail software’s repair features are being used for include:

• In Jewellers: Jewellery and watch workshop repairs, dated manufacturing.
• In Bike Shops: Bicycle and tricycle repairs, warranty returns.
• In music shops: instrument repair.
• In sewing shops: sewing machine maintenance and repair.
• In Garden Centres: Landscaping services management.
• In pool maintenance businesses: Pump and equipment planned maintenance as well as repair.
• In Firearms Stores: Gunsmithy and equipment repairs, warranty returns.
• In Pet Shops: Aquarium installations.

Repairs management software is flexible, serving a range of needs outside managing the actual repairs themselves. The flexibility in the software enables it to be used in different businesses for different purposes – from job management, to workshop management and traditional repairs management.

This specialty function software tracks the labour and resources used from a billing and inventory management perspective. It also handles allocation of repairs or parts of a repair to venues outside the business (for contracting and supplier exchanges or repairs for warranty issues, for example) and tracks repair staff and couriers used in shipping repairs.

Once the repair is ready for pick-up by the customer, the software finalises the billing and advises the customer by SMS or another preferred method. Customers love the contact they receive. It positions the business as professional and engaged.

Payments are processed with the usual depth of our retail software’s point of sale functionality – customers can make multiple payments against a repair or a specialist manufacturing, pay through cash, EFTPOS, PayPal or other methods.

Does your POS software run in the cloud? This is a common question we are asked.

Our answer … yes, our POS software runs in the cloud. We have many customers who do this. Some arrange their own hosting while others host through our secure off-site hosting infrastructure.

We also have many customers who choose to run our software on their own in-house desktop computers.

Our cloud POS software enables businesses to easily handle a single store situation through to a network of stores, 15, 20 … more. This is the flexibility of cloud POS software and we are here for it, helping small business retailers leverage cloud hosting to their advantage.

But, hey, if you run in a desktop situation, how can it be a cloud POS solution as well. Where the software runs, where it is hosted is 100% up to our customers. They choose the hosting platform that best suits their business needs and best suits their tech infrastructure access. This is important in that a business situation with poor internet access may not be ideal for a cloud hosted environment.

This is why offering flexibility for our customers as to hosting situation makes sense, it is why we provide our customers with choice.

Our POS software can be clod hosted or desktop hosted. You choose.

Big IT companies have spent hundreds of millions of dollars in marketing the term cloud. They have done this because they know buzzwords sell. The reality is, your software has to run somewhere. It has to be maintained. Whether it is running on computers in your business or in the cloud, the costs are not that different. The key difference is one approach feels sexier than the other, because of the marketing.

Our retail skilled account managers can talk with you to determine your needs and propose a solution that best serves your needs.

Whether you run cloud hosted POS software or desktop hosted POS software is best determined by your business needs, by your business situation. Take the time, do the research and decide what serves you, your location and your budget.

Tower Systems offers choice and that is what really does matter in the debate of cloud hosted POS or not.

When it comes to accounting software, Tower Systems has experience as a software company and through years of direct small business retail experience. This experience includes direct experience with MYOB, Quicken and Xero for accounting software.

While our POS software offers connectivity through to Quicken, MYOB and Xero, it is the Xero integration that is the deepest and most useful. We use Xero ourselves in-house. When it comes to Xero accounting software, our advice is personal.

Our POS software and Xero together provide a useful and appreciated accounting software solution to many small business retailers.

Our accounting software Xero integration is one of many approved integrations provided by the software to serve the needs of retailers. Other integrations include:

• Tyro broadband EFTPOS.
• Linkly integration for major banks EFTPOS.
• Magento e-commerce. Magento is an excellent platform for website sales for small to medium businesses.
• Shopify e-commerce. Shopify is an excellent entry-level solution for small to medium businesses.
• FlyBys in New Zealand.
• Transactor loyalty in New Zealand.
• Scale integration for selling by weight.
• Epay for vending phone recharge, fishing licences and more.
• Plus, many supplier integrations through EDI.

The most effective ways small business retailers can compete with big businesses and online is through efficient operation, accurate data and customer service touch-points that add appreciated value. This includes fit for purpose accounting software, tailored to the needs of the retail channel in which a business operates.

We believe in small businesses, their importance to local communities and their broader economic value.

Through our software, our personal  training, 24/7 human and locally based help desk service, regional user meetings, weekly online workshops and other touch-points we help small business retailers beyond what is usual for POS software companies.

Critical to all of this is the help offered from the Tower Systems customer service team. This includes providing advice on connectivity between our POS software and accounting software, helping our customers to ensure linkages are right, feeding data to the correct location within the accounts managed by the accounting software. Getting this right is key to calm and happy use of both the POS software and the accounting software.

Tower Systems is an Australia POS software company. We make what we sell. we support what we sell.

What we make and support is specialty POS – Point of Sale – software for specialty retail businesses, like haberdashery businesses and fabric businesses.

In our work with other specialty retailers, like jewellers, we have developed facilities in our software to manage things important to fabric and haberdashery businesses. Things like selling in fractions, handling special orders, tracking product and service components … and more.

Here is a short video where we discuss our fabric / haberdashery shop software with one of our sales people. we show you parts of the software and take you behind the scenes into a discussion of the benefits for this POS software for fabric shops and haberdashery shops.

This is truly specialty retail POS software. Take the selling of items by decimals or fractions. This is how fabric is sold. We make it easy and accurate. We even handle pricing that can vary based on the length of a fabric purchased. In other words, play less per metre the more you buy. This is handled by the software based on the settings created by those running the sewing shop.

Plenty of POS software solutions do not handle selling items by decimals or fractions.

We are not saying that our software is perfect for any haberdashers shops, fabric shops and sewing shop. That decision must 100% be up to those making the POS software decision in the business. We will demonstrate the software and answer questions, so that the necessary assessments can be made, to determine if our Tower Systems POS software is a good fit for the needs of a sewing business.

Our POS software for sewing shops and sewing machine businesses is already in use in these specialty retail businesses selling by length, doing repairs, handling special orders and more. We have people to whom we can refer. It is their innovation that set us on this path. Hence, our gratefulness.

If you are looking for a software solution for your business, we’d love to show you what we offer. We promise no pressure … our sales approach is the approach we want ourselves if we are considering a purchase – professional, based on your needs, honest and timed according to your needs.

We were thrilled to discover how useful our POS software is for candle shops. So much so that we’re happy to pitch it as candle shop POS software, software suited ideally to the management needs of candle shops.

Here are some of the ways our candle shop POS software suits candle shops:

• Product care information is served automatically on receipts and at other shopper touchpoint in-store as well as online. For a candle shop, we understand product care information can be differentiating.
• Ingredient details. Noting what is in a product, especially a candle product, can nurture customer satisfaction.
• For candle shops that make candles on-site, our manufactured goods facilities in the candle shop POS software enable to tracking of raw materials for appropriate inventory control and margin management.
• With many locally made products in a candle shop made on a just in time basis, finely tuned inventory management can help local candle shops / candle makers keep track of inventory needs so that sales are maximised without large inventory levels being held.
• Candle shoppers are loyal once they find a shop with the range they like. Thanks to smart and innovating loyalty tools, our Tower Systems candle shop POS software encourages shoppers to return for purchases again and agin without being in your face about it and without pitching a convoluted loyalty pitch.
• Seasonal performance reporting. Candle scents are popular on a seasonal basis. Understanding this through reporting tracking helps candle retailers to better range inventory to maximise seasonal opportunities.

Our candle shop POS software is ideal for local candle shops that operate in a shop or on the road at markets.

The popularity of candles spiked through 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic. For many candle retailers, interest in and engagement with candles has continued with many first time shoppers returning. Our software helps maximise the opportunity in-store as well as online through our Shopify e-commerce integration. We make it easy for candle shops to sell online, thereby reaching even more shoppers.

Tower Systems serves several thousand small business retailers in Australia and New Zealand – with POS software that we make and support and Shopify websites that we make and support. You can connect with us at sales@towersystems.com.au or on 1300 662 957 or 0800 444 267 (NZ).

Proud this is us …

Some retailers love the idea cloud POS software – not having to worry about software updates or managing the software installation itself.

Tower Systems offers cloud based POS software and has done for years … fully hosted with appropriate security and redundancy. Created for small business retailers with one store or several stores, this cloud based POS solution is working in a range of small business retail sectors.

In addition to providing our cloud based POS software solution, we also offer a desktop solution, which retailers install on their own hardware under their control and management. There are plenty of local retailers who prefer this control, who want to take care of their owns security arrangements.

Tower Systems offers retailers choice when it comes to cloud hosted or local installation. you choose as to what best serves your personal and business needs.

We think offering flexibility is key. It’s certainly what we have found ourselves in our own retail situations. we first ran some of ur shops in a 100% cloud model more than fifteen years ago. That experience helped us evolve our cloud POS offering.

There are some POS software companies that only offer a cloud solution and others that only offer a desktop solution. We are grateful to our software developers for providing a solution that can be either – in the cloud or on the desktop, allowing retailers to choose what is most appropriate to their business needs.

So, cloud or not? It really is up to you. take your time. Think about your business needs. Look at the total cost of ownership of each and make an informed decision. While one approach may look more appealing in the short term, it is the ownership cost over time that we think it is worth considering when assessing whether cloud hosted of desktop is the best approach for your business.

We can connect you with retailers in each situation so you can hear first hand from their experiences. We can also demonstrate what either approach may look like for you and your business.

While buzzwords sound cool, business decisions are best made on the evidence, away fro. the marketing gloss. this is why we say take your time, collect the evidence and decide what is right for you, when you are ready. we will support you through this.