Posts Tagged ‘Point of Sale’

P1Wired developers added a Quick Entry feature to the order form. This new feature makes it simple and easy to add items to an order.

Simply put in your item code, description, quantity and pose and the item gets added to the order. This new feature allows you to key in a 10 image order in less than 60 seconds.

If you have products or services set up with barcodes, P1Wired also supports a barcode scanner. This is an effective measure to increase workflow efficiencies and reduce key punch error. One site worth looking at is Barcodes Inc. to review the products and opportunties currently available in this space.

We just released some new features in P1Wired.  Most of the enhancements come from recommendations made by the current P1Wired user-base.  We will provide a brief write-up on each of the new features for photographers over the next several weeks.

As you know, if you are doing business face to face, accepting credit card processing has become a necessity.  We have enhanced the credit card processing in P1Wired so a photographer or studio can process credit cards in both a keyed and swiped format.

The swipe capability adds efficiencies in the form of lower merchant fees, reduced human error and time.  Given the importance of credit card processing to any retail business, we will make additional related enhancements in our next release this summer.

Please keep in mind when selecting merchant services:  4 Easy Ways to Save on a Merchant Account.

1. Ensure you have the right type of Merchant Account for your clients

2. Never focus exclusively on the discount rate — look at the entire processing expense

3. Look to save on the processing equipment given the efficiencies that have been created over the last couple of years

4. Limit the time associated with any agreement — if possible, move to a no contract relationship

P1Wired has teamed with Merchant Warehouse and believes the services and products offered by them are very competitive.  We are working very closely with Merchant Warehouse to address the ever changing credit card compliance and the requirement for better and tighter security with respect to sensitive credit card information.  We will continue to make sure this a priority for P1Wired – Simple and Easy.

The Point of Sale feature in P1Wired Photography Studio Management Software allows you to easily create an Order. Each order that is created can have a salesperson and photographer assigned to it. You can also assign a Category and Subcategory. This allows you to keep track of your sales by categorizing your events and then within events the specific type (i.e., weddings, charity, etc.). Also, as a portrait customer moves along in the process, you can keep track of the various stages and associated workflow.

For each order you can also keep track of the key dates. The session, order, ready and delivered dates make it easy to see where the order is in the workflow process. If you are running a promotion, you can tag each order to the appropriate promotion so that you have the data to determine what is or isn’t working.

For each order you can keep track of what the customer purchased. The item, quantity and pose are just a few things. If you have packages, you can predefine these and easily add them to the order. When you add an item to your order, the new item is listed right on the order for ease of use. P1Wired breaks them down by prints, folios, sessions, packages etc. so you can find the product without having to know a product code. You can further refine the sale process by adding a discount which can be calculated by applying an amount or a percentage.

The order totals are calculated along with the sales tax. Don’t forget about any special order notes, as P1WIred has a place for that too.

You can then add any payments for the order and run it through the credit card process, if you want. A credit card process is built into P1Wired so all this information is in one central place and can then be printed on your personalized invoice. You can upload your studio logo into the invoice to assist with leveraging your brand.

P1Wired has partnered with Merchant Warehouse who specializes in merchant accounts. Merchant Warehouse is proud to have been awarded the Credit Card Processing ISO of the Year award by ETA.

They are committed to providing advanced credit card processing products and services to photographers. They guarantee the lowest cost on credit card processing and merchant accounts so it is a worthwhile exercise to review your current account or start your due diligence with Merchant Warehouse if you are a first time user.

P1Wired is a Photography Studio Management software application that’s designed to run in your browser using a Mac or PC. It will be the core software to manage your business and ultimately integrate and connect with other software tools and remote capabilities. Although P1Wired is a new application, it shares many of the best features of PhotoOne, our desktop studio management application that has been an industry leader for over 15 years.

We coded P1Wired in Adobe Flex to provide you a state-of-the-art experience.

As you enter P1Wired you’ll notice that we’ve set up the application with four main areas:

1. We’ve got five icons along the top: Contacts, Calendar, Accounting, Dashboard and Reports. Let’s take a quick look at these features.

First we’ll click on Contacts. The Contacts section allows you to keep a record of your Vendors, Relationships, Payees and Family.

Next, let’s look at the Calendar feature. The Calendar is set up to give you any number of different views, whether daily, weekly or monthly. It also allows you to color code the calendar to make quick visual distinctions. The calendar syncs with Google calendar so an appointment in P1Wired will appear in Google calendar, allowing you access with your iPhone and other handheld devices.

Now let’s click on Accounting. The Accounting feature allows you to tie into order entry. It also allows you to keep track of deposits and expenses through multiple bank accounts. All of this is managed from a central hub called Chart of Accounts which allows you to bucket receipts, expenses, liabilities, assets, and cost of goods sold which will offer you valuable reporting and metrics when analyzing your business.

The Dashboard is a quick snapshot of your business. You can quickly look at today’s weather, review appointments entered on your calendar screen, review sales figures for the month and the previous 3 months along with the cash receipts that have been deposited in the bank. And you can review all open orders and associated balances to allow you to better manage the receivable aging process.

Finally, the Reports feature will provide you with a screen or printed summary of what’s going on in your photography business. Do you want to cross check your P1Wired checking entries against your bank entries? Do you want to run a quick Profit/Lost statement? Or do you want a transaction history by accounts? This will be all part of P1Wired.

2. Right underneath the Icons is a complete Client/Prospect list which is always active. Here you can quickly and easily access a client or prospect and add, delete or edit their profile.

3. Underneath the Client/Prospect listing is the Calendar. As we mentioned earlier, this is another easy and intuitive access point to your appointments letting you see when and where resources are allocated.

4. In the large blank area of the page is the Workspace or the “Make It Happen” area. When you click on any of the features in P1Wired they will open in the “Make it Happen” area which will provide a large work area for you to get your daily activities accomplished. When it’s not being used, you have the option of displaying your studio’s logo or image.

We have also included a Setup function that is accessed through the little wrench icon in the top right-hand portion of the page. As you enter into the Setup function you are able to customize your Customers, Products, Calendar, Orders, Accounting and Security. Each one of these features can be tailored to capture the information unique to your business. For example, if you go into the Customer section of Setup you will find that the Customer can be tagged within a Category and Sub Category. This will help you when you are looking to filter the data before running a report.

The client, through their order, can also be tagged with a Chart of Account and Relationship type allowing for additional client profiling when analyzing your business.

Another great feature in Setup is the Security feature. Here you can quickly and easily set up each employee or user’s clearance profile. Admin will have full clearance, but you may want only limited clearance for an employee based on experience or their role in the studio.

These are just some of the outstanding features of P1Wired! There are many more like credit card processing, multiple color schemes for the application, invoicing, sales tax, promotion capability, email and many others.

Go ahead — try out P1Wired for 30 days. Click the Free Trial button in the top right-hand corner of our website – p1Wired.com. We don’t need your credit card so go ahead and get started! Thanks and we look forward to having you as a member of P1Wired