New in Infinity – April 2021

The latest enhancements across the Infinity platform to help you and your team work more efficiently and create frictionless customer experiences.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Extend visibility of orders to branches and regional managers

The Order Orchestration Dashboard now has a read-only mode available at branch or head office level. This extends the visibility of orders to additional staff, giving them the ability to view but not update orders. At branch level, only orders within the region of that branch can be viewed. A regional filter at head office gives regional managers an overview of orders within their region.

Easier edits to orders during picking

It is now possible to view and edit an order from Pick Manager.  This simplifies the process of managing an order if there are any issues during the picking process, freeing up time and making it more likely that an order is updated correctly.

Better management of delivery and pickup times

When an order for collection has been picked via Pick Manager, it is now possible to prompt the user to enter a delivery or collection date and time.  This enables stores to schedule preferred times for the order pickups, for example, during non-peak trading times. The customer should be contacted to discuss the scheduled pickup time. This update also gives stores more information for managing their orders.

Easier selection of preferred suppliers

It is now possible to prevent a supplier from being automatically assigned to an order line for one or more branches. When enabled, the supplier is instead selected by the branch that will fulfil the order line if the order line cannot be fulfilled from store stock. This ensures that the store that fulfils the order line makes an active decision about where to source their stock and means that the supplier selected is more likely to be the best for that specific order in terms of cost or time to deliver.

Improve data integration with external systems

When adding or updating a sales order, non-printable characters entered into the order notes will no longer be saved to the database. This limits the risk of sales order integrations to external systems failing due to un-recognised characters and reduces the time spent correcting these issues. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Faster selection of products

For companies that sell non-barcoded products, or services with various options that can be selected, a new mode of the Infinity Options and Links product selection wizard allows you to navigate through the available options to select an existing product. This makes it easier for staff and customers to understand, simplifying the transaction and reducing time. It also allows you to analyse sales to find the most popular options selected and use this knowledge to update and improve the options available and drive more sales.

Easier management of duplicate barcodes

When managing item master data imported and exported to/from spreadsheets using Infinity ETL, it is now possible to import items with duplicate alternate barcodes.  This sometimes occurs when suppliers re-use a barcode on a different product. This new option frees up time spent adjusting data so that the barcodes are unique and the import is successful.

Improve data, stock and reporting accuracy

A new validation prevents child items from being re-activated unless the parent item is active.

Faster price updates

The Inventory Review module allows branches to choose whether to apply a recommended retail price change or to keep their own price.  For companies who use this module, entering price updates at head office is now faster due to recent optimisation of this module, freeing up some of the time spent administering data.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Better visibility of promotions and pricing options

New functionality helps users to upsell during a promotional period or when there is different pricing for an item at higher quantities. This function shows the user when Pricing Scales or Product Sets are applicable to the current sale. An indicator can be configured to appear on transaction lines where these pricing options are available and staff can click a button to view further details. 

Improve POS scanning accuracy

When a survey notification prompt appears on the POS screen and an item is scanned, Infinity no longer closes the prompt. This means that staff will not accidentally miss scanning an item into a sale, thinking that they have already done so, reducing revenue loss and improving stock accuracy.

Prevent unintended updates to pricing conditions

Infinity head office users can no longer create pricing conditions for their cluster for a promotional cycle that belongs to a parent cluster. This means that if a promotional cluster is updated, there are no unintended updates to pricing conditions at a lower cluster level.

Faster repricing

RBP Engine has been optimised to reprice large quantities of items with quantity breaks instantly. Repricing is now faster, creating  a faster customer experience.

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POINT OF SALE

Give customers Openpay payments

Infinity can now accept payment by Openpay in Australia. Openpay is an online and in-store payment solution that lets customers purchase now and pay later, with no interest. 

Reduce queue times with new search capabilities

You can now configure a POS button to call an advanced item search for a particular department, sub-department or class only. This is useful for quickly finding products of a particular type that are not barcoded at the point of sale, reducing queue times.

Another new feature is useful for quickly finding commonly sold products that are not barcoded. Advanced Item Search can now be configured to automatically show the top 5 selling items on opening.  If Advanced Item Search has been restricted to a particular department, subdepartment or class, then it will show the top selling items from that department, subdepartment or class. 

Enhance Slyp digital receipts

The Slyp Integration has been enhanced to enable better matches to EFTPOS transactions and now Australian retailers who use Linkly (formerly PC-EFTPOS-AU) can use Slyp to deliver Digital Smart Receipts to their customers' banking app.

Add VDMS vending machines

Infinity is now integrated with VDMS vending machines. Infinity can check the inventory levels in the vending machine and disallow a sale if there is not enough stock.  It can also check whether the vending machine door is open and disallow a sale if it is. Upon completion of a sale containing a VDMS product, the product is automatically issued from the vending machine. 

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INVENTORY

Faster generation of purchase orders

The performance of automatic purchase order creation by date range in Infinity has been significantly improved, which frees up time spent waiting for purchase orders to be generated.

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TECHNOLOGY

The Infinity Cloud Events Service can now publish heartbeat and sale transactions events using the Cloud Events v1.0 standard format either via Rabbit MQ or via cloud-hosted API.  These events can be used to integrate sales transaction data to other systems, for example, analytics, electronic marketing systems, financial applications and alerting systems.

The Infinity Cloud Events Service heartbeat processor now states whether the back office and/or station database connectivity (linking) is healthy or not. If its unhealthy, it will list the back offices and/or stations that are unhealthy.  This information can be used to raise alerts if a branch is not linking.

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OTHER

When viewing and searching for invoices using the Invoices API, you can now retrieve fuel sale and fuel discount information.  This is useful for providing this information to other third party systems, such as enabling a customer to view their transaction details.

The configured Maximum Sale Value can now be set to a decimal value. This feature helps support controls related to Anti-Money Laundering legislation, where businesses need to complete a series of person checks if the sale is $10,000.00 or more.

For companies with a large volume of transactions, it is now possible to schedule a task overnight to purge data older than a given number of days from the head office database rather than using the standard Infinity database clean-up which is not run at a scheduled time. If a company wishes to reduce the length of time that data is kept in the head office database, then this process can also be used to incrementally reduce the number of days of data held in the database, without having to reduce the data lifespan parameter each day. 

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – January 2021

Here’s what’s new in Infinity to help you and your team create frictionless experiences for your customers.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY

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Create a tiered loyalty program

A customer’s loyalty category can now be changed using the Loyalty API, giving you the ability to implement an integrated, tiered customer loyalty program. For example, if an existing customer signs up to be a VIP customer online, the Loyalty API will send updates to Infinity Loyalty and the customer will receive their new offers and rewards. This also allows an external CRM system to re-classify customers.

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Generate and track loyalty offers in external systems

You can now create loyalty offer codes in external systems (such as Salesforce Marketing Cloud) and make those codes available in Infinity to generate targeted offers, while keeping Infinity as the single source of truth. This means that when a Loyalty customer wants to redeem an external offer, your store staff and website can identify it by either reference, and the offer can be marked as redeemed in the external system when it is consumed in Infinity. Store staff can also identify the offer by both the Infinity offer description and the external reference.

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Retrieve fuel discounts faster

Support office staff who need to search through large volumes of cents per litre (CPL) fuel discounts can retrieve those transactions faster and more efficiently. Search results are now organised into manageable chunks in a paged format. Staff using Infinity Loyalty and external loyalty systems can take advantage of this enhancement. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Maintain accurate supplier information

Users are now warned if they try to use a product’s primary supplier as an alternate supplier as well. You can also use the new Duplicate Supplier Product Code Report to keep an eye on any double-ups and correct them.

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INVENTORY

Simplify goods receipting of packs

Your staff can now use pack details to receipt against invoices, simplifying the process by saving them the trouble of having to calculate the sell units that have been delivered.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Send customers progress updates for online orders

Keeping your customers informed about the status of their orders is now much easier following enhancements to Infinity Messaging. You can now send customers notification emails to show the status of their orders, such as completed and shipped, delivered or ready to be picked up. You can also send emails with pick-up reminders and when customers cancel orders. Order documentation can be attached to the emails to remind them what they have ordered.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Faster creation of branch-specific promotions

If your multi-branch business doesn’t already use Infinity’s branch cluster functionality, you can still create pricing rules for branch groups. This means you no longer have to create promotions branch by branch, saving you time and ensuring greater accuracy.

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REPORTING & ANALYTICS

Accurate data for aged trial balance reports

You can now report on historical aged trial balances for a specified date and time. Infinity allows you to capture a snapshot of these totals at crucial moments, such as month-end. This is particularly useful if you run month-end a few days later, but still need accurate data. The report works in conjunction with the Infinity SQL Job Service, which has been enhanced to include an Aged Trial Balance processor.

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POINT OF SALE

Assign accurate reasons for cash transactions

Assigning reasons to POS transactions has been enhanced so that you can now set up separate reasons for cash pick-ups and deposits. This means your store staff can provide more clarity about the reason for the withdrawal or deposit, such as “float top-up” or “window cleaner payment”. 

Easier access to customer pricing

It’s now easier for users to see customer pricing that applies to items when using the Advanced Item Search. If you use customer pricing in conjunction with single unit promotional pricing, a red border around the item’s tile in the search results lets staff know that it has been repriced, allowing them to tell the customer the actual price they will pay for an item.

Better visibility of customer wishlists in stores

Using in-store wishlists has become more seamless now that users don’t have to add an item to a sale in order to see a customer’s existing wishlist.

Faster retrieval of epay receipts

You can now configure your printed receipts to show the epay transaction reference, so if the original epay receipt is lost you can get the transaction reference from the sale receipt or the reprinted sale receipt.

Simpler customer refunds in stores

Store staff can now use Infinity’s Returns Extended function to search for transactions using eternal transactions references, such as those on warehouse dispatch documentation, as well as Infinity reference numbers, making it faster and simpler to find transactions to refund against. 

Easier attachment of dangerous goods certificates

If you sell dangerous goods, you can now attach a certificate type to more than one product type across a tiered product inventory. This is useful in situations where a customer who holds an advanced certificate needs to buy a product type that requires a lower-level certificate. Infinity now allows the advanced certificate to be attached to products at all lower levels.

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TECHNOLOGY

Help to disable TLS 1.0 for PCI compliance 

If you need to disable TLS 1.0 to meet PCI requirements, Infinity Core now supports using an alternate database provider that will connect to the SQL database with TLS 1.0 disabled. Prior to this change, disabling TLS would stop any connectivity to SQL Server databases.

Infinity Core is the first module to be updated and Triquestra will be working through the wider product suite to enable and validate operations without TLS 1.0 enabled.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

New in Infinity – September 2020

We’ve added new features and made enhancements across the Infinity platform to help you and your team work more efficiently and offer better experiences to your customers.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY

Let customers add items to their wishlist in stores

When a customer visiting a store is undecided about purchasing an item, your staff can now add the item to their personal wishlist. This gives the customer a convenient collection of items that acts as a reminder for future purchases and can be easily shared with family and friends. When they make a purchase, the item is automatically removed from the wishlist.

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PAYMENTS

Give customers frictionless payments with Adyen

You can now take advantage of the Adyen global payments platform for both online and in-store payments. Infinity’s new integration with Adyen’s global payments platform lets you accept local payment methods from customers around the world, and gives you the benefit of consolidating all your payment provider costs into one bill. When customers shop in your stores, they can use their credit or debit card to make the payment, no matter where they are from. The transaction details are automatically displayed in their language and currency, making the checkout process fast and easy. Adyen supports all popular payment methods, including payment wallets such as Alipay, WeChat Pay and Google Pay.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Provide customers with more details on product prices and stock availability

If you use the Infinity Product Price Lists API, your customers’ shopping experience across online and physical channels can be enhanced by exposing additional pricing and stock availability information. You can now show alternate pricing for a product, such as promotional pricing, country-specific pricing and loyalty pricing. If they want to buy a product that is not currently in stock, they can see when it is likely to be available. They can also see if a product is available as an individual product or in a box. 

Search for stock items is faster and easier 

You can now quickly search for stock items by product code, alternate product code and SKU at the same time. We’ve created a new Any Code filter on the Stock item screen at both Back Office and Head Office. 

Regulate your minimum and maximum stock levels 

If you use Infinity to regulate your stock levels, you can be confident that the minimum and maximum quantities you enter will work together correctly for all items and all branches. Validation has been added to the quantity fields on branch-specific items, so Infinity will let you know if the minimum amount is higher than the maximum amount, and vice versa.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Stores can now select the best delivery option for each customer using Shippit’s shipping platform

When an order is created at a point of sale and the customer wants their goods to be delivered, your store can now send a quote request to Shippit. Once they’ve selected the delivery option that best suits the customer, they can book the delivery and print a shipping label. Using Shippit not only automates the quote and booking processes, it reduces keying errors and removes the need to enter information into multiple systems. Shippit is only available for orders created using Infinity Order and Quotes.

Better visibility of items on pick list

Your store staff can now more easily see what needs to be picked as part of an online order. The full details of items with long descriptions can now wrap over multiple lines on the pick list, meaning team members can see items at-a-glance.  

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INVENTORY  

Easier product returns to suppliers

You can now search for items to be returned to a supplier using the supplier’s product code. This is helpful in situations where the simplest way to find items that need to be returned is by looking at the documentation that has been sent with the goods. 

Faster identification of stock source

It’s now easier to tell where stock has come from when you receipt a stock transfer. The name of the transferring branch has been added to the Receipt screen so that you can see the source of the stock at-a-glance.

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POINT OF SALE

Infinity is now accredited for Samoa’s new Tax Invoice Monitoring System

Samoan retailers can now use Infinity to give their customers instantly verifiable invoices required by the government’s Tax Invoice Monitoring System, introduced to ramp up tax collection and reduce tax evasion. Sales completed at the POS are sent to the Sales Data Controller which transmits a fiscal invoice back to the POS so the receipt can be printed. 

More accurate stock levels

Your POS operators will now be warned if they add an item with a zero or negative count to a sale using the Advanced Item Search. This will act as a reminder to staff to process stock receipts so that your stock levels are correct.

Faster collection of Goody loyalty points during customer purchases

The Infinity integration with Goody loyalty cards has been made more seamless by allowing card numbers and fuel coupons to be scanned straight into the product search box at the point of sale. 

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TECHNOLOGY

As part of our continual improvement, we’ve made a number of technology enhancements 

The AKPOS database can now be installed and upgraded in a cloud environment. This option is available to clients who host their HOS database on a supported SQL Server environment where full admin access to the SQL instance and the file system is not possible eg a SQL PaaS platform.  The supported SQL Server installations include:

• Microsoft Azure: SQL Managed Instance 

• Amazon Web Services: RDS 

• Google Cloud Platform: Cloud SQL 

• Plus any on-premise deployment using SQL Fail Over Clustering Services. 

There’s more:

• Infinity APIs have been upgraded to use .NET Core 3.1. 

• Infinity Cloud installer now supports SQL Server 2019.

• Multiple instances of the Infinity Identity API can now be run on multiple servers, removing the possibility of a single point of failure in high-availability environments.

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To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. 

If you’d like to get our regular ‘New in Infinity’ updates in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.

Webinar: How we’ve improved software quality and accelerated delivery with Smartbear

Watch our Head of Delivery, Greg Cantlon, explain how we quickly innovate and introduce new products for our clients, while ensuring high quality.

To ensure that our Infinity unified commerce platform supports retailers and brands to provide frictionless shopping experiences, we developed an API- and design-first approach to our product development.  

This helps us to quickly adapt to changing market demands and shifting consumer expectations, and deliver higher quality products with valuable features, faster.

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In this webinar our Head of Delivery, Greg Cantlon, describes our development journey and shares how adopting Smartbear tools has enabled us to:

• Automate UI testing and shorten our regression cycles from days to just hours using TestComplete, helping to ensure a seamless customer experience

• Adopt a design-first approach with SwaggerHub to provide clear API documentation to consumers

• Automate API functional and performance testing to reduce testing cycles with ReadyAPI.

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If you’re interested in how we’ve increased the quality and speed of our product development.

Frictionless payments with Adyen – now integrated with Infinity

Infinity’s new integration with Adyen’s global payments platform lets you accept local payment methods from customers around the world. 

Adyen is an all-in-one payments solution that offers your customers local payment options and alternative payment methods at checkout in over 145 currencies.

When customers shop with you in stores, they can use their credit or debit card to make the payment, no matter where they are from. When they swipe their card, the transaction details are automatically displayed in their language and currency, making the checkout process fast and easy.

Adyen supports all popular payment methods, including payment wallets such as Alipay, WeChat Pay and Google Pay. Adyen can also help your management of product refunds. Website or mobile orders can be returned in stores for a refund if the customer originally paid with Adyen.

Our integration with Adyen is another way that Infinity helps you offer new services that improve the customer experience and simplify your technology landscape. 

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To find out more about Adyen and how to add it to your payment options:

Infinity is now accredited for Samoa’s new Tax Invoice Monitoring System

The Samoan Government has introduced an electronic invoicing system to ramp up its tax collection and reduce tax evasion. 

As a local APAC solution provider, we’re committed to the Pacific Island region’s digital transformation and are pleased to provide early support for Infinity users’ peace of mind. 

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Called the Tax Invoice Monitoring System (TIMS), the rollout has started with large retailers and hospitality providers and will eventually expand to smaller stores throughout Samoa.

All registered retailers are required to use Electronic Fiscal Devices and provide customers with instantly verifiable invoices. Sales completed at the point-of-sale (POS) are sent to the Sales Data Controller, which transmits a fiscal invoice back to the POS so the receipt can be printed.

We’re pleased to announce that Infinity has been accredited by the Samoan Ministry of Customs and Revenue. Here’s more detail about the requirements:

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If you’d like to find out more about how Infinity can help you meet the new TIMS’ requirements, please contact us.

Keep a record of store visitors with Infinity Check In

We have restarted Infinity Check In, our free, contactless visitor register for retailers.

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Infinity Check In lets customers scan a QR code or give their details to store staff, so that you can keep a record of who has visited your stores or sites.

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First developed in April as a tool for contactless store visits, we closed it in June when retailers weren’t required to keep customer records for contact tracing.

The New Zealand Government now requires all businesses to display a NZ COVID Tracer QR code at each location. They also ask retailers to keep a contact tracing register at their sites for people who cannot use the NZ COVID Tracer app.

In Australia, some States and Territories require businesses to collect information about customers and visitors to their premises.

As a result, some of our clients asked us to restart Infinity Check In. We’re pleased to offer it again for any retailer that might want to offer an additional level of reassurance for customers and employees.

You can start using it here or talk to us for more information.

If you’re thinking of introducing a click-and-collect service to customers, here are our top three things to consider. 

New in Infinity – August 2020

We’ve added new features and made enhancements across the Infinity platform. Here are some of the main improvements so you can offer better experiences to your customers. Scroll down for the complete list.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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INVENTORY  

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Mark the lines on a purchase order as ‘Done’

Infinity users can now mark the lines on a purchase order that have been ‘Done’ when the purchase order is receipted. This feature helps prevent confusion about which lines have been processed and which still need to be actioned. 

Numeric stock entry for improved user experience

The Cloud Inventory Stock Take field that’s used to input counted quantities now displays the numeric keypad instead of the full keyboard to make it quicker to enter stock counts.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT 

Local stores can now determine the best supplier for orders from any channel

If you manage orders from multiple locations or channels, your stores can now determine the supplier, instead of the supplier being automatically assigned. This change is useful for retail call centres and businesses that use an endless aisle model and distributed supply chain because it enables staff to capture customer orders, and then lets the local store determine the best supplier to source the products from.    

Infinity EDI Service now uses SFTP & SSL certificates

The Infinity EDI Service can now use SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) with a shared SSL certificate, as well as the existing shared key and secret option. This enhancement allows the EDI system to connect to suppliers’ SFTP servers to send purchase orders.

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY 

See a live summary of a customer’s reward accumulator balance

Infinity Loyalty users can now see a live summary of customers’ reward accumulator balances on Infinity Cloud Membership screens. For instance, if customers get a free coffee with every tenth coffee purchase, you can see how many more coffees a customer has to buy before they qualify for the free drink. 

Fraud prevention has been improved

Prepay accounts were being locked sooner than they should because pre-authorised debit transaction activities were being counted towards standard debit transactions. Now only debits that aren’t related to pre-authorisations contribute to the fraud protection lock-out feature. 

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

The promotional cycle is now retained when a promotion for a cluster or a branch is created.

Previously, the promotional cycle was set to 'None' when a user created a new cluster or branch promotion, even if a promotional cycle had been selected. 

We’ve fixed an issue where the internal ID field on pricing rules was overwritten when updating data through the Infinity screens.

Integrated systems can now synchronise pricing data, including rules that have been edited in Infinity.

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REPORTING & ANALYTICS

Identify potentially fraudulent use of fuel CPL discount coupons

Enhancements have been made to the Fuel CPL Multiple Transaction Report to help you identify potentially fraudulent use of CPL discount coupons. The report also shows which identifiers were used for various transactions to help isolate exceptions and reveal high-use identifiers that require further investigation.   

A new report lets you see one-off payments to customers

A new Till Adjustment/Paid Out Report lists till adjustment transactions where money is paid out of the till only. This report can help you identify when POS operators have made one-off payments to customers for items such as scratch cards, and gives you better information for cash reconciliation.

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POINT OF SALE

Improved POS process for customers using the Infinity Loyalty prepay account and check-in

This workflow has been improved to let a customer check in again after deciding not to use the prepay account, without needing to generate a new check-in. Previously the customer needed to start the process from the beginning. This makes the POS process faster and simplifies the customer experience.  

Fuel pump number is now included in Digitfort DVR information

Fuel sale information that’s sent to the Digifort DVR system will now include the fuel pump number that was used for the transaction. This improvement makes it easy for auditors to investigate any issues relating to a specific fuel pump.   

You can now prevent payment types from being used to pay debtor accounts 

This feature means you can restrict the use of payment types for which financial, contractual or legal risks or issues may apply.  

The advanced cash management functions at POS can now prompt the POS operator to go immediately into the cash drawer and safe at the end of the shift. This enhancement helps speed up end-of-shift and end-of-day processes where the operator does not count the cash separately in the back office. If the operator does count the cash separately, they can cancel the prompt and return at a later time to add the counted values as per the original workflow.  

We have modernised the look and feel of some POS screens in micro-modules so they look like the main POS and give you consistency across all POS screens.   

The POS messaging for customers eligible for fuel CPL discounts from exclusive CPL rules has been improved. When a customer is configured as spend-only, the POS now displays ‘Customer cannot Stack daily offer as only Spend is allowed’. This message will be displayed regardless of the minimum spend configured against the rule. Previously, the POS would show ‘Customer cannot Stack daily offer as fuel purchase is less than {fuel minimum limit}’, even if the customer could only spend CPL discounts. This wording could be difficult for the operator to explain to the customer.

The message that the POS operator sees when the fuel CPL API is offline can now be customised, so the operator sees information and messages in a context relevant to them.  

Non-printable characters in the Dangerous Goods handler field were causing issues with integrated systems and reports. They will no longer be accepted and the user will receive a prompt showing the validation error.

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ADMINISTRATION

The Infinity branch cluster functionality has been extended to include Infinity customers 

All customer types can be assigned to clusters – debtor, normal (other account), layby and open account customers.

Branch specific button editing now with preview

When a head office user edits branch-specific buttons, the preview screen now shows the correct layout for the selected branch instead of the default master branch, so the user previews the correct layout.

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TECHNOLOGY

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Infinity now supports installations using Microsoft SQL Server 2019

Infinity still has support for SQL 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017, and ships with SQL 2014 as standard.  

Now you can send all sales transactions to a cloud-hosted API in Azure Event Hubs

The new Infinity Sales Invoice Notification Service lets the back office (or head office) send all completed sales transactions to a cloud-hosted API in Azure Event Hubs using the CloudEvents v1.0 standard. This feature lets you have a single central repository of all Infinity-completed sales transaction events that sit within the Azure Event Hubs platform. Sales transaction data can be provided to any client application that works with CloudEvents 1.0 standard event information, including analytics, electronic marketing systems, financial applications, and alerting systems.

Logging within the fuel CPL API has been extended

Now to include more information about requests received from the External Loyalty Fuel CPL Discounts API. This enhancement will make it easier for IT support to determine communication issues between these APIs.    

Enhanced the speed and performance of a number of GET endpoints

As part of continual improvement, we have enhanced the speed and performance of a number of GET endpoints in loyalty-related APIs when data is retrieved from the databases. These improvements provide faster API processing times and allow systems to accommodate a greater workload. 

New POS lanes ready faster

New POS lanes will be ready for use more quickly after Infinity is installed. The Point of Sale installer now bulk copies extended data and loyalty balances, which will make the initial data replication process much faster so you can use new POS lanes sooner.  

Flybuys loyalty caching

Caching has been added to the Fly Buys loyalty customer search function at the POS for speedier customer transactions. 

Daily database fix

We’ve resolved an issue with the automated daily database maintenance, so where configured, the daily tasks keep the system tuned for optimal operation. 

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There’s much more that’s new in Infinity – see all the new features and enhancements.

To discuss any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.

Infinity Check In is closing

Because New Zealand and Australian governments aren’t requiring retailers to continue with contact tracing, we’re closing down Infinity Check In on 10 July 2020.

Infinity Check In let customers scan a QR code or give their details to store staff for contactless store visits and information recording. 

We thank everyone who used Check In and hope you found it valuable. If there’s a need for contact tracing in the future, we may start it up and let you know it’s available once again.

New in Infinity – June 2020

Over the past two months, we’ve been helping our clients move to new ways of selling, expand their channels and minimise the impact of COVID-19 on their businesses. Thanks to our clients for the amazing collaboration over this time.

Here’s what’s new in Infinity so you can do more to improve the experience you offer your customers.

Infinity is a modular platform and you may need additional components or licencing to access some functionality.

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APIS

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Optimise fulfilment sources in conjunction with endless aisle

If you offer customers ‘endless aisle’, they can see and purchase any item in your inventory and choose how that item is fulfilled. The Infinity Catalogue API automates the selection of the fulfilment source. 

For example, if a customer wants to buy three items, the API determines the fulfilment options that are available for those goods – whether that’s in-store, click-and-collect, ship-from-store or any other methods you offer. Staff can see these options on the POS and customers can see them on your website. 

When the customer makes their selection, the API can receive the longitude and latitude of the delivery location, apply optimisation logic and pre-set rules, and then determine the best location(s) to fulfil the order from for the lowest cost or fastest speed. 

Having the API make the decision for the website or store staff saves time, reduces manual error, eliminates the need to perform this function within the eCommerce site, and gets the fulfilment process started for the customer even faster.

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New templates let you create loyalty offers more easily

The new Loyalty Offer Templates API lets you pre-define sets of promotional offers that can be reused for multiple campaigns and lists of customers. It’s a faster way for external marketing automation systems to create multiple offers because they can now use one request to add an offer for multiple customers, instead of adding one customer request per offer. 

For example, as a fuel retailer, you can create a template to offer a 10 cent per litre discount and a free drink to all customers who sign up to your loyalty program in July – all in a single API call. Or an apparel or homeware retailer could offer their top tier loyalty members a 20% discount off three specific products during July. 

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Now you can be more targeted with the fuel discounts you offer

There are new cumulative and exclusive rule types in the Loyalty Fuel CPL Discounts API. If you set an ‘exclusive’ rule type, it will be executed instead of any other cents per litre rules that are in place. A ‘cumulative’ rule type means that a customer will get a discount on top of the standard or promotional discount. 

For example, if you want to give additional discounts to a group of high value customers, you can offer 10 CPL instead of their standard 6 CPL. Or you can add 10 CPL to the 6 CPL and see which has better uptake. 

These rules can help you test offers, surprise and delight customers with additional discounts, and see if you can keep customers who might churn from buying their fuel elsewhere.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

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Now you can track why you didn’t win a quote

A new ‘lost quote reason’ type has been added so you can track and examine why you might have lost quotes to competitors or for other reasons.

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INVENTORY MANAGEMENT

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Receipt screen enhancements give you more flexibility to see what you want

We’ve improved the receipt screen so you can now order results by supplier product code when you receipt purchase orders that are matched to invoices and stock transfers. You can also highlight completed lines when receipting purchase orders.

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You can now configure the stocktake report to include or leave out child items

This new feature means you can include all child items, only child items that are counted, or no child items – giving you better control over your stocktake report details. For example, if you purchase boxes of wine, you can choose to include details of bottles sold individually in the stocktake report, or just the boxes in which they were purchased.

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POS

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Now it’s quicker to reprint receipts

POS operators can now select multiple receipts and print them all. They can search back through transactions by date, customer name or POS station. So if you want to reprint one customer’s receipts for a month, it’s now easy to do.

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For fuel retailers:  Customers can now see how much they’re saving when they pay

If you have a pole display at checkout, customers will be able to see how much their fuel discount is saving them because transactions can now be configured to show the amount saved as well as the amount to pay. 

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ETL

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Infinity ETL now supports kitset data

If you sell kitsets – one item that’s made up of other items – you can now maintain those kitset products in Excel and then import and export that data into Infinity via ETL.

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ANALYTICS

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New multiple transaction report can help prevent fraud

A new Fuel CPL Multiple Transaction Report can help you identify potentially fraudulent loyalty transactions. By being able to see a transaction count by loyalty card, you can spot cards that have unusually high usage. A use case could be if a staff member adds their loyalty card number to customer transactions in an attempt to gain more loyalty points for themselves. 

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ADMINISTRATION

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Passwords can now be reset at back office and head office

Now store managers as well as head office staff can reset passwords for themselves and store staff. It’s a time-saving feature that helps everyone work more efficiently.

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Add your company logo to Infinity POS

Now you can add your logo to your Infinity POS login and lock screens. Just place your images into the InfinityPOS folder named as logo_login.jpg/bmp and logo_lock.jpg/bmp.

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To find out more about any of these new enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us.