The POS Software Blog

The POS Software Blog

News from Tower Systems about locally made POS software for specialty local retailers.

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Software for beauty products suppliers, built around daily trade

September 27, 2026
3 Min read
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Running an independent beauty products business involves more than processing sales. There are supplier deliveries to receive, customer requests to follow up, different pricing arrangements to manage and an online shop that needs attention alongside the counter.

Tower Systems brings these tasks together in software for beauty products suppliers and retailers. The focus is practical: making everyday work easier while keeping useful information about stock, sales and customers in one place.

Support for the way customers buy

Easy selling at the counter is the starting point. Special customer orders help the business handle requests for products that are not available on the shelf, rather than leaving those requests in notebooks or relying on someone to remember them.

Club pricing and customer accounts provide options for managing established customer relationships. For a business serving both individual shoppers and beauty professionals, a demonstration can explore how these features would suit its particular pricing and account arrangements.

Customer marketing profiles add another useful layer. They provide a basis for more relevant communication, rather than treating every customer as interested in exactly the same products.

The aim is to support good service without making each interaction an administrative task. Staff should be able to focus on what the customer needs, with the relevant business information close at hand.

Less manual work behind the counter

Tower’s AI-assisted supplier invoice importing helps reduce the need to enter invoice information manually. Retailers can spend less effort transferring information and more attention checking the stock, quantities and prices that matter to the business.

For businesses that buy in bulk and create smaller products for retail sale, the software supports bulk-to-retail packing. This is worth exploring where the business’s own packed products sit alongside ready-to-sell supplier lines.

Shopify integration supports online selling, while the Xero integration connects the business with its accounting platform. These links extend the software’s role across the trading operation, not just the till.

Local experience and human support

Tower Systems has served local specialty retailers in Australia since 1981. The software is locally made, with local support delivered by humans.

For beauty products suppliers considering a change, a useful demonstration starts with the way the business actually trades. That might include a special order, a club customer, an incoming supplier invoice and a product packed from a bulk purchase.

Seeing those everyday examples is a straightforward way to assess the fit. The Tower team can arrange a demonstration and answer questions without pressure to make an immediate decision.

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Generic POS Software Fits Everyone Loosely. Vertical Software Fits You.

September 27, 2026
2 Min read
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Walk into any specialty retail business and the specifics jump out. A garden centre manages living stock that changes with the seasons. A newsagency juggles hundreds of magazine titles on sale-or-return terms. A jeweller tracks repairs. A produce store sells by weight, by bag and by unit, sometimes for the same product.

Generic POS software treats all of these shops the same. That is its nature, and its weakness.

Tower Systems is a vertical market software company. It makes software for specific needs and specific retail channels. Not generic software with a settings page, but software shaped around how particular types of shops actually trade: their stock structures, their supplier arrangements, their seasonal rhythms, their customer habits.

The difference shows up everywhere. In a vertical product, the workflows a retailer needs are built in, not bolted on through third-party add-ons that each carry their own fee and their own point of failure. Reports speak the language of the channel. Support staff understand the business, not just the buttons, because they work with that channel every day. And when the channel itself changes, the software changes with it, because the software company has no choice but to stay current in the niches it serves.

Generic platforms make a different bet. They aim for the broadest possible market and rely on retailers to adapt themselves to the software. Some businesses can live with that. Specialty retailers usually cannot, and they discover it months in, when the workarounds pile up and the “flexible” platform turns out to be flexible for everyone except them.

There is a useful test for any retailer comparing options. Ask the software company to name the retail channels it serves. A vertical company answers in seconds. A generic one answers with the word “everyone”, which really means no one in particular.

Tower Systems develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand. The focus is only on indie retailers, not franchises or chains. Specific software, for specific shops, is the whole idea.

Learn more at www.towersystems.com.au.

At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales@towersystems.com.au. If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367. Contacting a human is easy.

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Retail advice: Till not balancing? Start with the pattern, not an assumption

September 26, 2026
2 Min read
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An end-of-shift difference can be frustrating, especially when it keeps happening. For an independent retailer, the useful question is not simply how to make the figures match. It is why the difference occurred and whether the same issue is likely to happen again.

Start with the size of the discrepancy, when it began and what changed around that time. Those details can help separate a setup problem from a gap in procedure or something requiring closer investigation.

Check the setup and the handling of cash

A new computer or a change to the POS setup is worth noting. An extra float could be included in the end-of-shift calculation when it should not be.

If the figures were previously balancing, knowing when that changed gives support a useful starting point. A repeatable difference may be easier to investigate than a general report that the till is always wrong.

Cash movements need attention too. Money taken from the till needs to be recorded through the appropriate process so that the software reflects what actually happened.

The relevant no-sale function provides a way to record cash being taken out. Retailers who are unsure of the correct procedure for their setup should check with support rather than improvise a workaround.

Staff also need a consistent process. If different people handle the same cash movement differently, the end-of-shift figures can become harder to interpret.

Investigate discrepancies without jumping to conclusions

Repeated unexplained differences deserve attention. They may point to a procedural or setup issue, and in some circumstances they may warrant investigation for possible theft.

A discrepancy is not proof of wrongdoing. The sensible approach is to check the records, understand the process and establish what the available evidence actually shows.

For a useful support conversation, retailers can have the expected total, counted total and difference ready. It also helps to identify the affected register or shift and explain whether the problem is recent or longstanding.

Correcting a float setting requires a different response from improving staff training. Neither should be confused with investigating an unexplained cash loss.

Tower’s human support team can help retailers work through the software and setup questions. Finding the cause matters more than repeatedly adjusting a figure at closing time, because the aim is a balancing process that can be trusted on the next shift as well.

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$7,000 Off Hardware to Run Their Software? Read the Contract First.

September 26, 2026
2 Min read
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Some POS software companies are offering retailers thousands of dollars off computer hardware to run their software. One current pitch offers $7,000 off.

It sounds too good to be true. In Tower Systems’ experience, deals that sound too good to be true usually are.

Nothing is free. A software company giving away or heavily discounting hardware is recovering that money somewhere, because it has to. Sometimes it is buried in a higher monthly fee. Sometimes it sits in a long lock-in contract with painful exit terms. Sometimes it hides in payment processing arrangements that quietly clip every sale. Tower Systems has seen free or heavily discounted hardware become a genuine burden on a retail business, one that outlasts the shine of the deal by years.

So the advice is simple. Beware. Read the contract carefully, the whole contract, and be sure the business is happy with every clause before signing. What is the total cost over the full term? What does it cost to leave? What happens to the hardware, and the data, if the retailer wants out? A deal that cannot survive those questions was never a deal.

Better still, start with the software. That’s what we recommend – not because we are a software company but because we know software is where the real advances are made long after you commit. Hardware is static, software is not.

Hardware is a commodity. Screens, printers and scanners can be bought anywhere, at honest prices. The software is what the retailer will live with every trading day. Make sure it fits the needs of the business first, because good software can save a retailer thousands of dollars every year, honestly and repeatedly, through better margins, better rosters and better decisions. That saving compounds. A one-off hardware discount does not.

A retailer choosing POS software is choosing a long-term business partner. The right question is never “who is giving the most away?” It is “which software genuinely fits this business, and which company will still be answering the phone in five years?”

Tower Systems develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand, serving only indie retailers, not franchises or chains.

Start with the software at www.towersystems.com.au.

At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales@towersystems.com.au. If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367. Contacting a human is easy.

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You Can Teach Old Dogs New Tricks. Retail AI Is Proving It.

September 25, 2026
2 Min read
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They say you can’t teach old dogs new tricks. The evidence from local small business retail says otherwise.

Tower Systems has plenty of customers in their 60s, 70s and 80s. Retailers who have run their shops for decades, who remember paper ledgers and manual price stickers. According to the received wisdom, this is the group that should resist AI in their software.

The opposite has happened. These retailers have actively embraced the AI tools in the Tower Systems POS software, and they have become its champions. They love the innovation. They love even more the time it saves.

The feedback tells the story better than any brochure could.

“I can’t believe this is saving me personally 8 hours every week,” one retailer said.

“I was shocked at how good it is,” said another.

A third put it this way: “It found things in my business that I’d missed for years. I don’t know how much my ignorance cost me. The AI tools are amazing.”

That last comment is worth sitting with. Decades of experience is a strength, but no owner can see everything in their data. Good AI tools do not replace a retailer’s judgement. They feed it, surfacing the patterns and problems that hide in plain sight, then leaving the decision to the person who knows the shop best.

There is a lesson here about how technology lands in small business. Older retailers are not resistant to new tools. They are resistant to complicated tools, and rightly so. Make the technology genuinely useful and easy to use, and the so-called old dogs adopt it faster than anyone, because they can immediately measure the hours it hands back.

Tower Systems develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand. The focus is only on indie retailers, not franchises or chains, which keeps the AI tools grounded in the practical realities of local retail rather than big-chain theory.

Eight hours a week is a full working day, returned. That is a trick worth learning at any age.

See the AI tools at www.towersystems.com.au.

At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales@towersystems.com.au. If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367. Contacting a human is easy.

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The Next Tower Systems Update Is Coming, and Customers Wrote Much of the Brief

September 24, 2026
2 Min read
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Work is well advanced on the next Tower Systems POS software update.

The update, for small business retailers across Australia and New Zealand, delivers new facilities requested by customers, along with other refinements designed to help retailers save more time. Time is the currency that matters most in a small shop, and every update is measured against it.

What makes a Tower Systems update different is where the ideas come from.

Plenty of the suggestions in this update arrived through the company’s Software Ideas platform. It is a proprietary, transparent system that works simply. Any customer can suggest an improvement to the software. Every suggestion is visible to every other customer. And all customers can vote for the ideas they want most. The suggestions with genuine support across the customer base rise to the top, and they shape what gets built.

Customers guide the software development. Not a product committee guessing at what retailers might want. Not a sales team promising features to close a deal. Actual retailers, describing actual needs, voting in the open.

The transparency is the point. When a retailer can see what has been suggested, what is popular and what is coming, the relationship with their software company changes. It stops being a black box and becomes a shared project. Retailers also learn from each other’s suggestions, because a fix requested by a gift shop in Bendigo often helps a garden centre in Nelson too.

This approach only works because of who Tower Systems serves. The company develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand, and the focus is only on indie retailers, not franchises or chains. Indie retailers know their businesses intimately. Give them a genuine channel to shape their tools and the software gets better in ways no head office roadmap could predict.

The update will roll out to customers as part of their existing coverage. Details will be shared with customers as release nears.

Learn about the Software Ideas platform at www.towersystems.com.au.

At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales@towersystems.com.au. If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367. Contacting a human is easy.

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Card Surcharges End October 1. Retailers Deserve Control Over What Comes Next.

September 23, 2026
2 Min read
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From 1 October, the credit card surcharge ends for Australian retailers. Payment costs that were passed on to shoppers will now sit inside the business. For a small retailer, that makes payment processing rates matter more than they ever have.

Tower Systems has been preparing its customers for this shift for months, helping many retailers switch payments providers for better terms ahead of the deadline.

Our advice comes from experience, and a desire to help small business retailers. We want to ensure the transition is smooth, safe and valuable for our customers.

The company can do this for one simple reason: Tower Systems is payments provider agnostic. The software does not lock retailers into one payments company. Retailers choose the provider and the pricing that suits their business, and they remain free to switch when a better deal appears. That control now flows straight to the bottom line. When surcharging ends, every basis point on the merchant rate is money the retailer keeps or loses.

Plenty of POS companies work differently. Some earn a margin from a preferred payments partner. Some take it further and charge a percentage of every sale that passes through their software. It is worth pausing on that model. A software company taking a slice of a retailer’s revenue is, in effect, taxing that retailer’s sales. The busier the shop, the bigger the tax.

Tower Systems does not do this. There is no fee based on revenue. The company’s view is straightforward: a retailer’s revenue is theirs to keep. Software should be paid for as software, not as a silent partner in every transaction.

For retailers reviewing their setup before October 1, two questions are worth asking of any POS provider. Does the software let the business choose any payments provider? And does the software company take any cut of sales, directly or through a payments arrangement? The answers reveal whose interests the software really serves.

Tower Systems develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand, serving only indie retailers, not franchises or chains.

More on payments choice at www.towersystems.com.au.

At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales@towersystems.com.au. If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367. Contacting a human is easy.

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Cash Flow Is the Quiet Killer in Retail. Good POS Software Helps.

September 22, 2026
2 Min read
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Ask any small business retailer about their biggest pressure and cash flow lands near the top of the list. Often at the top. You only have to look on social media or Reddit where cash flow in small business retail is an often-discussed topic.

Sales can look fine while cash quietly tightens. Stock ties up money on shelves. Margins drift down without anyone noticing. Rosters creep up. By the time the problem shows in the bank account, it has been building for months.

These are common things we see in small business retail.

This is where POS software can genuinely earn its keep, and it is a core focus of the Tower Systems POS software.

The help is practical. Retailers get easy access to up-to-the-minute performance information, so decisions rest on today’s facts rather than last quarter’s guesswork. Pricing can be adjusted easily to improve gross profit, item by item or across a category. Rostering insights reveal opportunities to reduce labour costs without hurting service. And built-in guidance points to decisions that will improve the financial performance of the business, drawn from what the data actually shows.

None of this requires an accounting degree. That matters. The typical indie retailer is time-poor and wears every hat in the business. Tools that demand hours of analysis do not get used. Tools that surface the answer do.

There is a reason the software works this way. Tower Systems is a vertical market software company. It makes software for specific needs and specific retail channels, not generic software stretched to fit everyone. A vertical focus means the cash flow tools reflect how specialty retail businesses really run: their seasonality, their margin structures, their supplier arrangements. Generic software cannot know those things. Specialist software is built on them.

Tower Systems develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand. The focus is only on indie retailers, not franchises or chains, and practical help with cash flow is central to how the company serves them.

Better cash flow rarely comes from one big move. It comes from many small, informed decisions, made sooner. The right software makes those decisions visible.

See how at www.towersystems.com.au.

At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales@towersystems.com.au. If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367. Contacting a human is easy.

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Small Business Retailers Understand Human Service: When Did Talking to Your POS Software Company Become So Hard?

September 21, 2026
2 Min read
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There is a disconnect between some software companies and their customers, and retailers feel it most when something goes wrong.

The pattern is familiar. A retailer needs help, so they visit the software company’s website. There is no phone number, only a form. Or there is a phone number, but it leads to a multi-layered menu that ends with an invitation to leave a message. Or the only channel is email, with a reply promised in one to two business days. Or the call connects to an offshore help desk where the staff, through no fault of their own, do not know much about the software itself.

None of that helps a retailer with a queue at the counter.

Tower Systems takes a different view. Support is personal, and it all starts with a conversation. Retailers who call Tower Systems talk to a human. Not a menu. Not a chatbot standing guard in front of the humans. A person who knows the software, because supporting it is their job.

That accessibility runs deeper than the help desk. Customers of Tower Systems can easily reach a human in support, in sales, and in leadership. Plenty of software companies keep their decision-makers well away from customers. Tower Systems does the opposite, and has for decades. It is a genuine differentiator, and retailers notice.

Why does this matter so much in specialty retail? Because context matters. A generic help desk can reset a password. It takes people who understand a retail channel to help with the question behind the question, the one about the business itself.

Tower Systems develops and supports POS software for local specialty retailers in Australia and New Zealand. The focus is only on indie retailers, not franchises or chains. That focus keeps the company close to the people it serves, close enough to answer the phone.

For any retailer weighing up POS software, here is a simple test: before signing anything, try to get a human from the company on the phone. The result tells you plenty. At Tower Systems, we’re here: 1300 662 957 or sales @towersystems.com.au If you’re in NZ, call 0800 444 367.

Learn more at www.towersystems.com.au.

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If you want more traffic to your website: do these three things

September 18, 2026
3 Min read
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Here Are Three Things To Fix On Your Retail Website This Week

If your website is not bringing you the traffic you hoped for, the cause is usually not the design. It is more often three small habits, and each one is inside your control.

This advice is based on years of experience helping retailers win more sales online. And, you don’t need to spend a cent with us to leverage this advice.

Start with your product names. Look at a product you sell well in the shop and read how it appears online. If a brand-name plush teddy bear is listed simply as “teddy bear”, you have made it invisible. Nobody types that. Put the brand first, then the detail that matters to the person searching, then the category. Pick your twenty best sellers and rewrite those names today. Fifteen seconds each. That is the highest-return half hour you will spend on your site this month.

Second, write. You already answer questions across the counter every day, and those questions are exactly what shoppers are typing into search. Which plush is safe for a newborn. How to clean a soft toy without ruining it. Why one brand costs more than another. Take one question per post, answer it plainly in a few hundred words, and publish regularly. Do not attempt a monthly epic. Short and consistent beats long and abandoned, and it builds the subject authority that both search engines and AI answer tools now reward.

Third, put yourself on the site. Go to your About Us page and read it as a stranger would. If there is no owner’s name, no photograph, no phone number and no email address, add them. Shoppers who have never bought from you check that page before they trust you with a card number. Yes, someone may ring for a chat. That is local retail. It is also how relationships start.

One thing to stop doing: do not fill your site with generated imagery. If your homepage carousel shows a shop that is not yours and products you have never stocked, shoppers notice, and they leave. Your slightly imperfect photo of your own window display will outperform it every time. You compete on being real. Do not give that away.

Do all three and give it ninety days. You will see the difference in your traffic and in the enquiries you receive.

Tower Systems builds and supports websites for small business retailers, and works with you on what the site actually returns. Start a conversation at sales@towersystems.com.au.

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Retail Advice: Don’t Let Bad Data Kill Your Business

September 17, 2026
2 Min read
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Your Data Is Making Your Decisions, Whether You Trust It Or Not. And, Bad Data Kills Businesses.

Here is an uncomfortable test. Pick ten items off your shelves at random, check what your system says you hold, and count what is actually there. If more than one or two are wrong, every report you run is telling you a story that is not true.

That situation is more common than most retailers would like to think. We have seen it first-hand.

A recent review of an independent retail business found more than half of its inventory records were inaccurate, either wrong stock on hand counts or descriptions so vague they meant nothing. The business was losing money and the owner could not see why. Nothing in the numbers was reliable enough to point at the problem.

This matters more now than it did five years ago, because you are probably feeding your sales history into AI tools and expecting insight in return. Understand what those tools do with poor records. They do not flag them. They read them confidently and hand you an answer that looks authoritative. A confidently wrong recommendation about what to order for Christmas is far more expensive than no recommendation at all.

The fix is not complicated, and you do not need a consultant to start.

Receive every delivery into the system, on the day it arrives. Sell everything through the register, including the small stuff. Write off damaged and expired stock rather than leaving it on hand. Process supplier returns properly. Give every product a description you would be happy for a customer to read. That is the whole discipline, and it is a habit rather than a project.

If the objection is labour, and it usually is, look at where the keying happens. Nobody should be typing supplier invoices line by line. Tower Systems provides an automatic invoice import facility that brings those invoices straight into your system, along with training and documented processes designed to keep your records accurate at the lowest practical labour cost.

Across many years of working with independent retailers, the most consistent factor in failure has not been rent or competition. It has been numbers nobody trusted, in a business where nobody had time to fix them.

Take the ten-item test this week. If it goes badly, talk to us at sales@towersystems.com.au before it costs you a season.

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Advice For Retailers On How To Assess The Point Of Sale Offer That Knocked On Your Door

September 16, 2026
3 Min read
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You have probably had the visit, or you will. An overseas point of sale (POS) company, a friendly pitch, free hardware, payments included, one bill and one contact. When you are already working six days a week, simple sounds wonderful. The offer deserves a fair hearing. It also deserves half an hour with a calculator before you sign anything.

It usually sounds too good to be true, all the free stuff and how easy it is.

Things like this are rarely what they seem.

Ask about the payments arrangement first. Bundled offers usually tie you to one payments provider. That removes your ability to shop around or renegotiate later, and EFTPOS rates are where independents most often find real savings. Ask directly whether you can bring your own provider. If the answer is no, that is a cost, even though it will not appear on the quote.

Then ask about the percentage. A clip of every transaction looks trivial on a quiet Tuesday. Run it across your annual turnover and look at the number. Then run it across the turnover you are hoping for in three years. You are being asked to pay more as you succeed, which is worth thinking about carefully.

Now the part most owners skip. List the five things your business does that a general retailer does not. Repairs and valuations if you are a jeweller. Care information and seasonal stock if you are a garden centre. A workshop running alongside the floor if you sell bikes. Selling by weight, by the cube and off the back of a truck if you are in produce. Take that list to the demonstration and make them show you each one working. Not described. Working.

A retailer who recently ran that comparison function by function and cost by cost found Tower Systems came out cheaper on total cost, and better suited to how their business actually traded. We can show you the numbers and let you see for yourself in your specific business.

Understanding total cost of ownership of POS software is important if not wasting money is important top you.

Your specialisation is why customers choose you rather than a chain. Software that cannot see it will slowly push you toward competing on price, and that is the one contest you cannot win. Make the visiting salesperson prove otherwise before you commit.

Tower Systems writes software for specialty retailers across a wide range of trades, and is happy to be measured against any comparison you care to run. Enquiries are welcome at sales@towersystems.com.au.

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Success Can be Found In Discomfort In Retail

September 15, 2026
2 Min read
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Most retailers know exactly which report they do not run. It might be the one that would show stock going missing. It might be the performance of the range you changed six months ago, or the supplier you took on because you liked them. Perhaps it is the comparison of what each team member actually puts through the register.

Not looking is entirely understandable. Finding out a decision failed feels personal in a business you built. But the cost does not pause while you avoid it, and it compounds quietly.

Here is a practical way to start. Choose one uncomfortable question this week and answer it properly.

We know many small business retailers who have found success by exploring parts of their business that they know will be uncomfortable for them.

Run your theft (shrinkage) numbers. Compare theoretical stock on hand against a physical count in one high-risk category and see what the gap tells you. Pull the sell-through on the last range change you made and ask honestly whether it earned its shelf space. Look at gross profit by supplier rather than sales by supplier, because a busy supplier and a profitable supplier are not always the same business. Compare average sale and items per sale across your team, not to blame anyone, but to see who might need coaching and who might be worth learning from.

Give yourself twenty minutes and a cup of tea. That is the whole exercise.

What usually follows is undramatic and valuable. A dead line is deleted before you reorder it. A supplier conversation happens a year earlier than it otherwise would. A shift pattern changes. Stock worth thousands moves out of the corner nobody walks past.

Tower Systems point of sale software for local independent retailers is built to surface exactly this kind of thing: whether theft is occurring, whether a product or category has failed rather than merely slowed, whether a supplier is returning what it costs you, and how performance compares across staff and trading periods. Evidence instead of a feeling about how the month went.

Retailers who work this way tend to make each mistake once. That is the difference, and it is available to you without hiring anybody.

If you would like help finding these numbers in your own system, contact us at sales@towersystems.com.au.

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Ten questions produce, stockfeed and farm supply retailers ask

September 14, 2026
2 Min read
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Over the last fortnight Tower Systems published an answer a day to the questions produce, stockfeed and farm supply retailers ask most often about their systems. Each answer covers what the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses does about it. Every one came from a real conversation in a real store.

They are collected here.

  1. Selling by the kilo, the metre and the half bag. Getting bulk sales accurate, and why it decides whether margin reporting means anything.

  2. Buying raw material and bagging an own blend. Following stock from raw material through mixing to the bag on the floor, and finally knowing what an own brand earns.

  3. Two trucks, six drops. Managing dispatch in a system rather than on a whiteboard, and pricing delivery with the cost known.

  4. Farm accounts on 30-day terms. Statements out on time, ageing visible, and seeing the drift while it is still small.

  5. Chemicals over the counter. Records that can be produced later, and prompts that guide whoever is on the counter.

  6. Labels that survive the yard. Weatherproof labelling, and why readable labels are really about trusting the stock file.

  7. Selling off the truck and at the field day. Taking real sales away from the counter, including where there is no signal.

  8. Keying supplier invoices by hand. Electronic invoice links, what is realistic, and where the hours actually come back.

  9. One stock file for shop and website. Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce, with the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses as the single source of truth.

  10. End of month taking a weekend. Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks, and books that are current enough to make decisions with.

Any produce, stockfeed or farm supply business is welcome to use this material. Pass it to whoever else in the business would find it useful.

And if one of the ten is a live problem right now, let us know, ask us how the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses deals with it. The answer on fit will be honest. Being told early beats being sold something that does not suit the business. If we think we may not be right for you, we will say so.
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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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End of month takes a weekend. Where does that time go?

September 11, 2026
2 Min read
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Ask ten independent retailers what they lost last weekend and a few will say the books. We hear this so often, especially in the more complex businesses like rural supply / produce businesses.

The usual pattern is a pile of paperwork, a spreadsheet, and re-entering into accounting software what has already been entered once at the counter and once in the stock file. Sales, invoices, account payments, banking. All of it typed a second time.

It is also where errors arrive, because the second entry is done tired and late. Every time you touch data manually, it’s a mistake opportunity.

Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses integrates with Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks. Sales and account activity flow through rather than being re-keyed. Combined with electronic invoices arriving from suppliers, the manual work at both ends of the month reduces sharply.

What retailers usually notice first is not the hours. It is that the numbers agree. When the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses and the accounts draw on the same data, the reconciliation conversation with the bookkeeper or accountant gets shorter and cheaper.

The second thing they notice is timeliness. Books that are current are useful. Books that are six weeks behind are history. Making a call on a range, a supplier or a price rise needs this month’s picture, not the picture from before Easter.

Two practical suggestions.

Talk to whoever does the books before changing anything. They will have a view on chart of accounts and how they want the data to arrive, and that is a much better conversation before setup than after.

And decide what the real goal is. Fewer hours is one. Better information is the bigger one.

No retailer should be spending weekends on data entry. The work is real, but most of it has already been done once.

If end of month is costing you too much time, lets talk as see whether what we offer could help you run a more time efficient and accurate business. We know we are not the right fit for everyone. If we think that based on your needs, we will say so.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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One stock file for the shop and the website. Is that realistic?

September 10, 2026
2 Min read
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One stock file for the shop and the website. Is that realistic?Yes, and it should be the only arrangement any retailer accepts.

The trap is running two businesses. Stock managed in the shop, stock managed again online, and the two drifting apart. Something sells overnight and the shelf does not know. A price rises in store and the website quietly keeps the old one. Descriptions and images are maintained twice, so eventually they are maintained once and the website goes stale.

Our bTower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses integrates with Shopify, WooCommerce and BigCommerce. Product descriptions, pricing and images synchronise from the software to the site. Online sales flow back in, so inventory stays precise and the sale sits in the same reporting as everything else.

The important word is direction. The Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses is the single source of truth and the website reflects it. One place to maintain, one stock file, one set of numbers at the end of the month.

For produce and farm supply businesses there are some specific opportunities here.

Bagged feed, animal health and pet lines travel well online with local pickup. Nothing needs to be shipped by the tonne for a website to earn its place.

Account customers can order online against their account rather than by phone, which takes work off the counter without losing the relationship.

And the best customers often want a repeat order to be two clicks, not a conversation.

One caution. A website is a channel, not a strategy. Untidy stock data becomes visible to the world once there is an online store. Getting the stock file right comes first, and it also happens to be the thing that makes everything else in the business work.

Let’s see if we can help you here. Explain your businesses in fully – physical retail, and online – and we will let you know what we can help with.l If, based on your needs, we think we may not be a good fit, we will say so, for sure.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Keying every supplier invoice by hand. What would it take to stop?

September 9, 2026
2 Min read
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Ask a produce / farm supply / stockfeed business owner where the week goes and invoice entry is usually on the list. It takes time. The invoices are long, and often complex.

Invoices arrive. Someone checks them against what turned up. Then someone types them in, item by item and cost by cost, so that stock levels and costs are right. In a business carrying thousands of lines across feed, animal health, hardware, fencing and seasonal ranges, that is hours every week. It is also where cost price errors enter the system, and a wrong cost is a wrong margin on every sale until somebody notices.

The Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses has electronic invoice importing tools, and Tower Systems works directly with suppliers to establish the links. The invoice arrives as data. Costs update. Stock updates. The team checks rather than types.

That second part deserves underlining. The Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses is not a file format handed over with best wishes. Building data links with suppliers is work Tower Systems has done for years across many specialty retail channels. Where a customer needs a link with a supplier who does not yet have one, that is a conversation Tower Systems is willing to have with the supplier.

Now the honest limits, because this is where software companies oversell.

It depends on the supplier. Some are excellent. Some send a PDF and nothing else. Some will build a link if enough of their stockists ask, which is why raising it matters.

It depends on the data. Item codes on both sides need to reconcile. That is setup work, done once.

And it will not cover every invoice that arrives. The target is the largest suppliers by line count, because that is where the hours are.

Even a partial result is significant. Two or three major suppliers linked can return most of a day a week.

The invoices the Tower systems software can import are evolving, as the AI model learns more, and we are regularly training it to be more capable.

For a business keying invoices by hand, send Tower Systems examples if invoices, and we will test them for you. If they don’t work, we will say so.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Selling off the truck, at the field day, and where there is no signal

September 8, 2026
2 Min read
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Plenty of selling in the produce / stockfeed / farm supply channel happens away from the counter.

A delivery driver takes an extra order at the gate. A staff member is at a field day for three days. There is a market, a show, a sale day. In each case business is being done a long way from the shop, and often somewhere the mobile signal is poor or absent.

The usual workarounds are a duplicate book, a docket pad, or a note on a phone. All of them create the same job: someone re-enters it later, from someone else’s handwriting, days after the fact. Stock is wrong in the meantime and something always gets missed.

Retailer Roam, part of the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses, processes sales away from the store. Off the truck, at a field day, at a market. It works when an internet connection is unavailable, which matters more in this channel than in most.

With Henty Machinery Field Days running 22 to 24 September, this is timely. For any business exhibiting, taking a real sale — with the stock recorded and the customer captured — is a different outcome to a pile of dockets to process the following week.

Three things change once selling away from the counter runs through the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses.

Stock accuracy holds, because the sale is a sale in the system rather than a note to be entered later.

Customer records grow. A name and a contact captured at a field day is worth something for the rest of the year, particularly for a business building an email list.

And nobody is doing double work. No one spends the Monday after an event keying three days of paper.

If selling happens away from the counter and it currently means paperwork later, send Tower Systems a note on how it works today and ask what the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses would change. The answer on fit will be honest. If it is not a fit, that will be said.
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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Product labels fade in the yard. What survives outside?

September 7, 2026
2 Min read
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Let’s talk about a small problem in produce / stockfeed / garden centre businesses that costs more than it should.

Stock in a produce or farm supply business does not all live indoors. Fencing, posts, troughs, tanks, pallets of bagged feed, landscaping supplies. It sits in the yard through summer and through rain, and the label sits there with it.

Then the label fades. Or it lifts. Or it goes soft and unreadable. Now the item cannot be scanned, so someone at the counter types a price from memory, or walks out to look, or guesses. Multiply that by a busy Saturday.

Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses supports weatherproof labelling for stock stored outdoors. Labels that stay legible regardless of the conditions, so the item can still be scanned in six months.

What matters here is not the label. It is what depends on the label being readable.

Scanning is what keeps a stock file accurate. Every keyed price and every guess is a small error in the data, and those errors compound into reports nobody trusts. A retailer who stops trusting the stock file stops using it, and then the software is just a cash register. Scanning is the habit the Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses is built to protect.

Accurate scanning also protects margin on exactly the lines where margin is thin. Yard stock is often heavy, bulky, competitively priced and slow to move. It is the last place a price from memory belongs.

A few practical notes. Label size matters outdoors, since bigger survives handling better. Position matters, because sun and water hit some faces harder than others. And bin or shelf labelling is often the better answer for stock that is stacked rather than individually tagged.

It is a ten-minute conversation that removes a daily irritation.

If outdoor stock in your business is hard to scan, give us an example and we will test this for you, to show what a weatherproof label will look like. If we can’t fit on the detail you need, that’s vital to your business, we will say so and let you know our software may not be right for your needs.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Chemicals over the counter. What do you have to be able to produce?

September 4, 2026
2 Min read
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This is the post nobody wants to read and every produce and farm supply retailer should.

These businesses sell products that carry obligations. Agricultural and veterinary chemicals, restricted products, items with handling and record requirements. If records are requested — by a regulator, an insurer, or a lawyer after something has gone wrong — the answer needs to be a system, not a memory.

What turns up in stores is a folder. Sometimes a good folder. Often, though, a folder with gaps, kept by one person, and unavailable when that person is away.

Our Tower Systems software for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses includes hazardous material information support, with notifications and documentation. The product carries its own information. The right prompts appear at the point of sale. You can see for yourself if this serves your specific needs based on the materials you sell.

The benefit at the counter is that a casual on a Saturday is guided by the software, depending on how you have it set up. They do not need to know which products carry which requirements, because the system raises it. That is a training benefit as much as a compliance one.

The benefit later is retrieval. A question answered in minutes, from the system, with the detail intact.

Two things are worth saying plainly.

Software does not make a business compliant. The obligations belong to the business, and they vary by product and by state. What good software does is make the right process the easy process, and make the record retrievable.

This is also not only about regulators. Stock control on restricted products matters. So does knowing which customers buy what, and how much, across a season.

If these records live in a folder, it is worth seeing how a system handles it. Send Tower Systems a note on how it is managed today. The response will be honest about whether there is an improvement available. If there is not, that will be said.

It’s important to us that we pitch our software where we are certain it serves the need. We have other businesses we can suggest you look at if we think we are not the right fit based on what you tell us.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Farm accounts on 30-day terms. How do you stop carrying the district?

September 3, 2026
2 Min read
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Account trading is normal in this channel. It is also where independent produce and stockfeed businesses quietly get into trouble.

Terms are 30 days. Reality is longer. Seasons are hard, relationships are long, and nobody wants to be the person who chases a fourth-generation customer over an invoice. So the balance drifts, and the business funds it.

The problem is rarely goodwill. It is visibility. If statements go out late, and nobody can see at a glance who has moved from 30 days to 60, the drift stays invisible until it is large.

Our Tower Systems produce / farm supply / stockfeed software manages customer accounts properly. Charges go on the account at the counter. Statements are produced and sent on time. Ageing is visible, so the balance can be read by period rather than as one number. A customer trending the wrong way is easy to spot while the amount is still small.

Some practical points for any produce or stockfeed business reviewing this.

Statements sent on time change behaviour on their own. Many businesses find that consistency alone shortens average collection time, before anyone makes a phone call.

Credit limits are worth setting even where there is no intention of enforcing them hard. A prompt at the counter is easier than a conversation later.

Account trading data is customer data. Who buys what, how often, and in what season. That is useful for far more than collections.

The accounts side also needs to reach the bookkeeping without being keyed twice. The software integrates with Xero, MYOB and QuickBooks, so account activity flows through rather than being re-entered.

Cash flow in this channel is seasonal and always will be. The goal is not to become hard. It is to know exactly where the business stands, early enough to act.

If accounts are running longer than terms, send Tower Systems a note on how statements and follow-up are handled today. The answer on whether the software is a good fit will be honest. If it is not a fit, that will be said plainly.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Two trucks, six drops. What did that run cost you?

September 2, 2026
2 Min read
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Delivery is a service most produce and farm supply businesses provide and few measure.

The orders come in through the week. Someone works out what can go on which truck. The run gets written on a whiteboard, or in a notebook, or in a spreadsheet that only one person understands. The truck goes out. The paperwork comes back. And the question of whether that run made money never gets asked, because answering it would take an afternoon.

Meanwhile fuel, wages and the vehicle itself are all costing you, and delivery is often being given away because it always has been.

Dispatch management is included in our produce software. You can manage multiple trucks and multiple deliveries per vehicle. Orders are allocated, the run is built in the system rather than on the wall, and what went where is recorded against the customer.

For businesses running a serious fleet, we integrate with Allotrac, which is a purpose-built dispatch platform. That is the right answer for operators who have outgrown a whiteboard but do not want their POS pretending to be a logistics system.

The reason to care is not tidiness. It is pricing.

Once the run is in the system, you can see which customers are cheap to serve and which are not. You can see the drop that is always out of the way. You can see whether your minimum order for free delivery is set at the right level, or whether it was set in 2019 and never revisited.

Most retailers who do this work end up making one of three changes. They lift the free-delivery threshold. They put a fee on the outlying runs. Or they consolidate a day, which takes a truck off the road for a shift without losing a customer. Any one of those is worth real money over a year.

Delivery is not a favour. It is a service with a cost, and it should be priced with the cost known.

If you deliver and you cannot say what a run costs, tell me how you organise it today and we will tell you honestly whether we can help. If we cannot, we will say so.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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You buy raw material and bag your own blend. Where does the stock go?

September 1, 2026
3 Min read
Y

You buy raw material and bag your own blend. Where does the stock go? This is the question that separates software made for produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses from software adapted to them.

You buy in bulk. Grain, pellets, minerals, chaff, whatever your mix requires. You combine it to your own recipe. You bag it, label it, and sell it under your own name. Somewhere in that process, most systems lose track.

What usually happens is that the raw material is treated as stock and the finished bag is treated as a separate product with no relationship to it. So the raw material never comes down, or it is written off manually, and the finished product appears out of nowhere. The stock on hand for both is wrong. The cost of the finished bag is a guess. And the gross profit on your own brand — often your best margin line — is unknown.

Our locally made and supported produce / stockfeed / farm supply software handles the whole chain. You record the purchase of raw materials. You record the mixing of those materials into your own product. The finished, packaged product exists as its own sellable item, with a cost built from what actually went into it.

The effect is that your own-brand line becomes measurable. You can see what it cost to make, what it sold for, and how it compares to the branded equivalent on the same pallet. Retailers who mix their own product usually suspect it is their strongest margin. Being able to prove it changes how they range and price it.

A few notes from our years of experience serving produce / stockfeed / farm supply businesses.

Recipes change with input prices and season. The software should let you reflect that without rebuilding the product.

Wastage is real. Build it in rather than pretending it does not happen, or your costs will read better than they are.

Batch and pack size matter. If you sell the same blend in 20kg and 40kg, they need to relate back to the same raw material properly.

If you make your own product for your business and your current system cannot follow it from raw material through to the bag on the floor, that is worth a conversation. Send me how your process works today and we will tell you honestly whether we are a fit. If we are not, we will say so.

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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Selling by the kilo, the metre and the half bag

August 31, 2026
3 Min read
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Most retail software assumes a customer buys one of something. Produce and farm supply retail does not work that way.

A customer wants nine kilos out of the bulk bin. Another wants four metres of cable off the roll. A third wants half a bale, because half a bale is what fits in the ute. None of those are a scan of a barcode.

We hear how stores handle this today. Someone works it out on a calculator and types in a dollar amount. Or there is a shortcut key set up years ago with a price that has not been reviewed since. Or the item goes through as one unit and the difference is absorbed. Each of those costs money quietly.

Selling by weight, length and fraction is a core part of our produce software. The item is set up once with its unit of measure and its price per unit. At the counter your team enters the quantity, or takes it from the scale, and the software does the rest. The sale is accurate, the stock on hand drops by the right amount, and the gross profit on the line is right.

That last point is where the value sits. If bulk sales go through as dollar amounts, your reports cannot tell you what you made. Category performance, supplier performance and margin by line all rely on the quantity being real.

There are three practical things worth thinking about in your own produce /stockfeed / farm supply business.

The first is your unit of measure. Decide whether you buy and sell in the same unit, and set the software up to handle the conversion if you do not. A tonne in, kilos out, is common and easily handled.

The second is who is allowed to override a price. Bulk sales are where discounting creeps in. Being able to see who did what, and when, is worth having.

The third is your scales. Where a scale is doing the weighing, the software should be taking the weight rather than your team reading it and typing it. Fewer keystrokes, fewer errors.

None of this is exotic. It is the basic requirement of selling bulky goods, and it is the first thing we show in a demonstration for a produce business, because a system that cannot do it properly will cost you every day it is in place.

If you are selling by weight, length or fraction today, tell me how you handle it now and we will tell you honestly whether we are a better fit. If we are not, we will say so.
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Contact us: sales@towersystems.com.au or 1300 662 957 or research us: www.towersystems.com.au. Locally made. Locally supported.

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Advice For Produce And Rural Supply Businesses Choosing Software

August 31, 2026
3 Min read
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If you run a produce, stock feed, farm supply, rural supply, ag supply, fencing or saddlery business, you already know that most retail software was not written with you in mind.

Before you sit through another demonstration, work out what your business actually needs it to do, then make the software prove it. To be honest, this is where you need to invest your time – be sure about what matters to you and others in the business.

Start with your yard. If a customer pays at the counter and then drives three hundred metres to collect the goods, you need a docket printing where the stock is, not only where the money was taken. Ask to see that configured.

Then map the selling that happens away from the site. Trucks loaded at the store and invoiced farm by farm as goods come off the tray. Stock managed inside a dairy, checked on a scheduled visit and invoiced on the spot. Gas or bulk orders taken across the week and grouped into delivery runs. If any of that describes your week, dispatch scheduling and mobile invoicing are not extras. They are the job.

Look hard at how products are handled in your business. Do you build feed mixes or own-brand blends from components you buy in? You need manufactured goods handling, so the system reduces what was purchased and creates what is sold. Do you receive landscape supplies by the tonne and sell by the cube, half cube and quarter cube? You need fractional and weight-based selling in the same product file. Add kits and care information and you have a fair test of any system.

Factor in where you are heading, too. As independent pet retailers close, many produce businesses have moved further into pet food. Giftware has appeared. So have cafés, which means kitchen printing and order modifiers in a rural supply setting.

Finally, ask about paperwork and money. Quotes emailed to customers, invoices emailed, pick slips printed, supplier orders raised from customer orders, and a clear view of who owes you what. Tower Systems added a debtors dashboard following customer feedback for exactly that reason, and its dispatch scheduling plans routes through Google Maps across multiple vehicles, with an optional link to Allotrack for GPS tracking.

Then ask what it costs. Ours is one subscription, unlimited phone and live chat support around the clock, no professional services fees to configure the software, and no percentage taken from your transactions.

Tower Systems may or may not be right for your business. Our commitment is that if we think we are not right for you, we will say so, and wish you all the best.

Enquiries are welcome at sales@towersystems.com.au.

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