Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team reduce operational complexity while improving the customer experience.
Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.
INFINITY API
Enhance business continuity during a processor failure
The Cloud Events Service’s processors will now keep running even if one of them fails. The processors that aren’t directly impacted will continue to operate, lowering the risk of business interruption. You can configure the service so that you’ll be alerted via email to the failure by a fatal error warning.
PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT
Faster access to historical sales impacted by unit cost changes
When viewing historical sales transactions in item maintenance, you can now see exactly when changes to the unit cost of an item started to impact sales line costs.
Improve data privacy by concealing stock costs from store staff
If you want to keep the cost your business pays for stock confidential, you now have the option to hide it from the sales and credits screen at the Back Office so that it’s not exposed to your store staff.
INVENTORY
Simplify urgent stock transfers from warehouse to store
If your business manages all stock requests from the head office, you can now use Infinity’s replenishment request function to order branch stock, instead of raising a purchase order. This can be useful if you want to get an item from the warehouse to a store at short notice and you are happy for the warehouse to send what it can based on availability.
Increase receipting speed and accuracy with audible scan warnings
Using Cloud Inventory to receipt items that have arrived in a consignment of multiple stock transfers will improve your detection of errors now that store staff get a “bad beep” warning when they scan an item that isn’t supposed to be in the consignment or an item that has an invalid barcode. We’ve also improved your staff’s ability to identify variances for over and under transfer receipts, making the receipting process speedier and more precise.
CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY
Meet privacy law obligations by automating customer data retention periods
We’ve enhanced Infinity Loyalty to give you more options for managing your Personally Identifiable Information (PII) risk. You can automatically remove customer data from POS and Back Office machines when there are no open sales orders and no transactions for that customer within a configurable period.
Before you can use this functionality, you need to have a stable infrastructure, as the customer search will always use a connection to the Head Office. Also note that these changes should be part of your wider PII programme.
Streamline mass updating of free prepaid product offers
Offering free prepaid promotional products can be an effective way of engaging with your existing customers. We’ve made adopting this strategy more seamless now that you can use Infinity Loyalty to update many prepaid product balances at the same time.
Enhance security by deactivating stolen partner loyalty cards
If you use Infinity Loyalty with partner programmes, you can now block a customer’s Airpoints or Flybuys card that has been stolen or involved in a fraudulent transaction so it can’t be used as an identifier at your Point of Sale or at an outside payment terminal, thereby protecting your business from potential fraudulent card use.
In addition, by blocking (and not deleting) the identifier, you remove the risk of it being allocated to another customer.
Create tailored rewards when resolving customer concerns
We’ve enhanced the ways you can reward Loyalty customers by enabling you to manually adjust a customer’s accumulator balance at the Head Office. You can use this new function to add a “stamp” for a customer, so that, for example, you can give them a free coffee as a way of resolving a concern or query.
Speed up loyalty customer scanning during a sale
Scanning a loyalty customer into a sale is faster and more efficient now that your store staff no longer have to open the customer search function before scanning the customer’s card. If you want to maintain customer confidentiality, this has the added benefit of not exposing customer information to your store staff.
PRICING & PROMOTIONS
Simplify the set-up of quantity-based promotions at any price level
If you use quantity price breaks, you can now apply those breaks to prices 2-8, as well as to price 1, on the Infinity item master data. Applying breaks across all price fields can be easily managed using Infinity ETL, which saves you the hassle of manually maintaining the various individual pricing scales for an item.
REPORTS & ANALYTICS
Improve stock management with better inventory-related reporting
We’ve made a number of improvements to the end-of-month financial reports so that they’re more useful for inventory-related reconciliation. The Stock Movement Summary Report now offers a transaction breakdown using both quantity and cost values, as well as allowing you to easily see any variance between opening and closing balances. This means the report provides an easily readable view of all stock-related activity and allows you to identify instances where incorrect store processes were followed, such as selling items into negative stock.
Other changes have been made to support these enhancements. Both the Stock Movement Summary Report and the Sales and Stock Gross and Profit Report now round the cost to four decimal places rather than two, as a way of further improving the accuracy of the reports’ cost figures over a long period, while the Chronological Item Movement Report includes the item on-hand quantity, which will be shown in red if a stock movement puts the item quantity into negative.
Help store staff make purchasing decisions for future promotions
Infinity’s new RBP Promotions Report allows your stores to see upcoming and current promotions and helps them make the purchasing decisions needed to run those promotions. They can use the report to understand what they need to order and when they can reduce ordering as promotions come to an end, as well as to check that shelf labelling has the right pricing information. Head office staff can use the report to help stores plan and run promotions, including through advance advertising.
ADMINISTRATION
Enhance financial integrity with mandatory end-of-day completion
If you use Infinity’s extended Cash Management functionality, you’ll find we’ve made some enhancements to reduce the risk of errors. Your store staff won’t be able to create a trading day if they haven’t completed an end of day on a POS station that has had sales activity, or if that station hasn’t linked to the Back Office that day. This ensures that all financial transactions are available at the Back Office when the trading day is created and removes the possibility of sales and till adjustments being missed.
Extend lifespan of stock records for open transactions
You can now keep stock transaction records open for a very long period if they are associated with open purchase orders and unreceipted transfers. The records will remain active and available for updating for the life of the transaction, even after the configured lifespan limit has been reached.
Boost security by eliminating barcode login risks
Staff logins can be a security concern for your business, especially if your people create barcodes by entering their credentials on third-party websites and then use those barcodes to log in. You can now negate the usefulness of these websites by requiring that all users log in manually rather than by scanning IDs. .
To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.
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