New in Infinity – June 2022

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you unify your physical and digital channels, create a differentiated omnichannel experience, and let your teams work more efficiently.

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

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INFINITY API

Access real-time fuel inventory

Fuel retailers can now get a near real-time view of fuel inventory levels at branches, helping to simplify their stock management. Fuel tank dip values and inventory levels can now be regularly posted as an event notification for processing by external downstream systems, such as fuel delivery management software.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Easier updates to item costs

If your business uses Infinity’s inventory review function to manage price updates at branches, you can now update an item’s recommended cost at the branch when that item’s unit cost is updated at head office, saving you the time and effort of changing the cost manually. If you use Infinity ETL to bulk update item data, you also now have the option to update the recommended cost of an item for a specific branch or for all branches.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Launch new fuel promotions

Fuel retailers can now offer dollar-off fuel coupons with each fuel transaction, giving marketers another tool to incentivise customers to shop with them, and helping to increase customer retention and boost sales. It allows them to reach a different customer segment, with different purchase motivators.

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REPORTS & ANALYTICS

Give stores access to sales data at-a-glance

You can now give your stores easy access to stripped-down sales information using the new Product Sales Summary Report. This report includes the number of individual items sold and total value, minus information you might want to exclude (such as costs or margins).

Better cash management reporting for branch managers

The Banking Transaction Report is now available at the Back Office, allowing branch managers to view the movement of money into and out of the trading location.

By viewing their banking deposits and receipt transactions, they can more easily reconcile bank statements or review cashflow within their store.

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POINT OF SALE

Faster item data updates via Wedderburn scales integration

Infinity is now fully integrated with Wedderburn scales. This means that changes to item data in Infinity, such as price per kg, can be pushed directly to Wedderburn, rather than users having to update the prices again independently on the scales.

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TECHNOLOGY

SQL Server Always On Availability Group

If your Head Office database is set up in an Always On Availability Group (AOAG) with appropriate read-only access, you can offload some Linker load to the read-only node to distribute the SQL activity for the Linker, thereby reducing the load on the primary SQL node. Note: At present, only one high-use query uses this feature.

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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 – April 2022

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you unify your physical and digital channels, increase your team’s operational effectiveness and differentiate the customer experience.

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

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INFINITY API

Access real-time order data

Order information is now available in real-time to streamline fulfilment execution. Infinity now allows services to subscribe to changes in order status, such as dispatch or voiding. The updates can be used to integrate order data with other systems, such as ecommerce sites to provide dispatch or cancellation email updates to customers, ERP systems and buy-now-pay-later financing schemes.

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Increase accuracy of data capture during complex sales

Infinity now gives you the ability to capture extra information for highly complex sales transactions, with validation during the process to ensure data accuracy. Businesses with complex item data requirements can configure rules and validations to capture specific information before a product can be added to the sale. Extended rules can also be configured for payment processing, receipt printing and exclusive selling rules.

Using this new functionality, a business might decide to take payment on behalf of other businesses (such as power companies and local authorities), requiring highly accurate information to be captured at the time of payment. By configuring the rules required by those other businesses, you can be confident that all information is being captured and all necessary business processes are being followed.

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INVENTORY

Faster adjustments of non-stock products

Head Office and branch users can now easily find non-stock products with negative stock on hand and correct the stock automatically to zero. Instead of having to identify items manually and create a stock adjustment for each one, users can now save time by finding all non-stock products with negative inventory and set them all to zero at once.

Give branches more local purchasing flexibility

If your stores have multiple regional supplier contacts, your staff can now directly email their local sales rep rather than having to go through a centralised contact for all stores. Branches can also now create customised supplier email addresses for sending purchase orders, giving them even greater control over the local purchasing process.

Increase accuracy of cost updates

Branch users can now update the cost of an item on the master data automatically during the invoice matching process, allowing them to avoid the pitfalls that come with manually inputting cost updates and ensure data integrity.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Automate store notifications when branches re-assign orders

Infinity will now prompt your store staff when an order line has been re-assigned to them from another branch and is awaiting processing (for customer collection in store or ship-from-store), ensuring that all parts of a customer order are processed and fulfilled in a timely way.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Assess profitability of promotions

When you create a pricing promotion using Infinity’s pricing wizard, you can now see the worst-case scenario for gross profit percentage. This allows you to easily gauge whether promotions are financially viable and gives you greater control over profit margins in your business.

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REPORTS & ANALYTICS

Give store staff more returns visibility

You can now provide your branches with more information on returns. If goods are returned to your store but originally sold at another store, store staff can now see details of the return transaction, and not the details of the original sale transaction.

If the goods were both sold and returned at the store, they will see a range of details about the transaction, such as the date the goods were sold and returned, the return price and quantity, the reason for the return, the store operator who processed the sale and the return, and the receipt number.

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POINT OF SALE

Increase stock visibility during sales process

Infinity’s Advanced Item Search now allows you to see stock levels and pricing at nearby branches. This gives better visibility during the sales process to businesses who source inventory from other branches. For those businesses that capture sales orders through a call centre, the inventory and pricing will default to the branch that the current customer belongs to.

Easily adjust your returns policy

If your business uses Infinity’s extended returns function, you now have greater flexibility over your return policy. You can choose to allow goods to be returned to any store. Alternatively, you can simplify the return process by only allowing customers to return goods at the store they made the original purchase.

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TECHNOLOGY

Increase email security

Infinity now supports the use of TLS 1.2 and a wide number of common SMTP ports to send emails. TLS 1.2 allows for better encryption and, in turn, improved security when sending emails via Infinity.

Support for Microsoft Edge browser

Infinity now supports using the Microsoft Edge browser engine technology to display external websites where support for Internet Explorer 11 has been removed.

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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 – February 2022

Here are the latest enhancements added to the Infinity platform to help you and your team work more efficiently and create fast, omnichannel experiences your customers expect.

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

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INFINITY API

Incentivise loyalty members to buy

A new API lets your online customers see potential loyalty points earned on items, giving them an additional incentive to make a purchase.

Easier retrieval and display of alternate prices

The Products API now allows you to retrieve an item’s standard selling price and alternate selling price, per store. This is useful if you want to display information such as ‘was/now prices’ on your ecommerce portal or any other system that consumes the Infinity APIs.

Give customers real-time RRP prices

The new Product Price List API enables you to display comprehensive, accurate RRP prices to customers by retrieving from Infinity a real-time view of a full price list for one item in all branches, all items in all branches or a combination of both.

Easier access and display of custom data on debtors

The Accounts Receivable API now enables you to retrieve, manage and create business-specific information about your debtors that is contained in custom fields. You can use this custom data for either display or functional purposes within your system.

Retrieve and identify more pricing information

The Products API now includes more pricing data in responses, so you can retrieve and identify more pricing and unit information relating to products.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Improve mobile user experience when creating purchase orders 

Staff creating purchase orders on a mobile device can now receive additional notifications when finalising the order to help minimise potential errors, saving your business time and admin costs.

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CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY

Easier access to loyalty point movements for marketing

You can now access information on loyalty points earned or consumed on sales transactions, offering additional marketing communications triggers and data analytics around loyalty point movements.

Give customers and staff access to historical loyalty balance transfers

You can now see where a customer’s loyalty balance was transferred from or to in their transaction history, helping customers understand how their balance has been consumed and making it easier for your support office to understand historical transactions when resolving issues.

Faster retrieval of refund transaction details

Line description details for refund transactions are now included on debtor statements, letting you quickly and easily see which items were refunded.

Easier access to product refund or replacement details

The Sales and Credits function has been enhanced with additional fields to give you more options when searching for customer transactions. This interactive function lets you search for historical transactions and can help resolve post-sale queries such as determining whether a product is eligible for a refund or replacement.

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REPORTS & ANALYTICS

Increase visibility of stock value at each location

The Item Location Report has been enhanced with additional information to allow you to understand the dollar value of goods at each location, giving your finance team greater visibility over your stock.

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POINT OF SALE

Remove the risk of illegal age-restricted sales transactions

You can now configure Infinity so that age-restricted items can only be sold by store staff above a certain age, protecting your business from the risk of illegal transactions. 

Faster access to ePay gift card details

ePay gift cards can now be swiped through Vault EFTPOS terminals, giving your store staff a quick alternative to scanning or manually entering the card number when selling a gift card or checking a gift card’s balance.

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TECHNOLOGY

Reduce the time to install new back-office and PoS terminals

The Infinity setup process now allows for bulk copying of certain tables when building a branch linked to the Head Office. This will reduce the amount of time it takes to perform the first linking cycle after Infinity has been installed on a new machine in businesses that have a large amount of data in those tables.

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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 – November 2021

Check out the latest enhancements across the Infinity platform designed to help you and your team work more efficiently and create the fast, frictionless experiences customers expect.

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

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INFINITY APIs

Easily validate customer addresses

Infinity is now integrated with the Addressify and NZ Post address validation services. This prevents customers from providing inaccurate or incomplete address details, giving you the confidence that web and store orders are linked to the correct customer address. It includes validation of addresses for loyalty customers, orders and quotes, and customers stored in Infinity Loyalty. To use this feature, you’ll need a service agreement with Addressify and/or NZ Post.

Increase efficiency when receipting multiple POs

A new API allows your external suppliers to create a group of purchase orders (or purchase order lines) to make it easier for you to receipt multiple purchase orders at once. Suppliers can generate an Advanced Shipment Notice to provide information about the items included, and their related purchase order lines, so you can be prepared to check and accept delivery.

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INVENTORY

Increase accuracy of inter-branch stock transfers

Your stores can use the new Inter-branch Transfers Report to check for any variances between stock sent to them from another store and the stock that arrives. The report helps reduce inventory leakage between branches and force better stock management practices. It’s particularly useful for retailers who sell high-value items that are routinely transferred between branches. Stores will only see stock movements to or from their own branch.

Simplify stock receipting

You can now configure Infinity so that whole numbers (1,2,3) rather than decimals (1.00, 2.4) must be used in stock receipting. This simplifies stock receipting if you only use whole numbers in stock management and reduces the opportunity for time-wasting errors and confusion. 

Comply with AGDC data requirements

North American cigarette retailers can now use Infinity to meet AGDC (Altria Group Distribution Company) scan data requirements. You can report sales to tobacco companies directly, and then receive reimbursement from them, using an automated process that identifies eligible sales transactions and generates weekly reports in a AGDC compliant format.

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Full visibility of orders

The Click and Collect Dashboard has been renamed the Orders Orchestration Dashboard to better reflect the wide range of customer order scenarios that it manages, including collection and delivery via store-to-door, drop shipping and click and collect.

Email customers order information

If you capture transaction data in the TH_FieldText fields, you can now include that data in the email that is sent to customers with their transaction receipt.  This allows you to include additional, business-specific information in the email that your customers receive.

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REPORTS

Give fuel sites better AA Smartfuel loyalty reporting

Fuel stores have three new reports that enable them to see transactional details for the  AA Smartfuel program, more easily gauge how the program is performing and assess ways to improve its productivity. The reports include analysis of fuel discounts accumulated by customers, fuel discounts redeemed by customers and non-fuel product sales that qualified for shop-sponsored cents-per-litre discounts.

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POINT OF SALE

Give your customers a single receipt

If your business uses PC EFTPOS NZ, you can now take advantage of the ability to only print one receipt, saving on paper and giving your customers the option to make a more sustainable shopping choice.

And if you want to go paperless and eliminate all paper receipts, Australian retailers can use Slyp Smart Receipts to send digital receipts direct to the customer’s banking app.

Let customers mix and match their loyalty accounts

Fuel retailers who use Infinity Loyalty to offer cents-per-litre discounts via an app can now allow their customers to group together loyalty accounts using the app and redeem saved cents-per-litre discounts from any of these accounts during a fuel purchase. This allows fuel customers who have multiple accounts amongst family members to mix and match how they use their accounts, reducing potential confusion about where their saved cents-per-litre discounts have gone.

Analyse historic foot traffic in stores

You can now record the foot traffic in your stores retrospectively, instead of just on the current day, giving your staff greater flexibility in record-keeping and providing a more comprehensive, reliable picture of the numbers of customers entering your stores. The foot traffic functionality is also now available in Restricted Back Office.  

Allow customers to change their minds during refunds

Your store staff can now cancel out of a refund to Afterpay and Zip, giving customers the opportunity to reverse their decision and preventing unintentional refunds to these two payment methods.

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TECHNOLOGY

• Stock information can be shared throughout your solution infrastructure more readily and seamlessly. The Cloud Events Service now publishes notifications about purchase orders, goods receipts and goods receipt cancellations, in addition to sales invoices. That means external systems, such as ERPs, use near real-time stock management information from Infinity rather than having to use custom integrations, flat files or pulling information using API.

• We’ve renewed Infinity’s certification with Quest Payment Systems in New Zealand, giving users of the Quest pinpad configured for use with Paymark the ability to integrate their EFTPOS solution with Infinity POS.

• Infinity now allows you to proactively prevent accidental mass data updates which can impact the Linker performance and reduce the real-time accuracy of information. Additional protection on the AKPOS database triggers blocks if updates to more than 20,000 rows are attempted within a single update. Block triggers can be removed as well as added.  

• To help retailers improve their security compliance, Infinity Web Integration and Infinity Loyalty now support the ability to work with TLS 1.0 disabled. This enables businesses to disable the now obsolete TLS 1.0 protocol and reduce their security risk profile. 

• Infinity Quickfire has been modified so that you can now automate upgrades by performing a silent upgrade of Infinity ETL and the Infinity Cloud Events Service using the Command line.

• The Infinity Gift Card API has been converted to a REST API for easier integration.

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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 – August 2021

Here are the latest enhancements we’ve added to the Infinity platform to help you create the frictionless experiences your customers expect.

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

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INFINITY APIs

Extend product pricing options 

The Products API now offers greater versatility when determining prices. Previously, users could select Price1 at the Head Office or an alternative (eg Price8) at a specific site. Now the API returns all prices set up from Head Office (when left blank) or all prices set up for a specific site (when the site code is supplied). So, for example, you can use Price8 at the Head Office to produce a single global price for a product.  

Faster troubleshooting following database error 

The Cloud Events Service now stops on a fatal error. Previously, it only logged an inability to connect to the database and when the maximum retries were exceeded it entered a state where the service was still running at the Windows level, but it wasn't doing any work. Now, if the service fails to connect to the database for more than the configured retries, the Windows service will stop, allowing OS level monitoring to raise alerts and perform recovery operations.  

Easier sales to non-debtor customers  

Using the Infinity pricing engine and pricing conditions to price a cart on a web store then pass the resulting sale to Infinity is now simpler when selling to non-accounts receivable customers for integrations that use Infinity APIs. Output from the Infinity Carts API can be used as input to the Invoices API with only a few additional pieces of data added. Previously some manipulation of the accounts receivable account code was required for non-debtor customers.

More control when retrieving price change records 

The Product Price List API has been enhanced to allow a consumer of the API to retrieve recent price changes while also specifying the maximum number of records to return. This enables the consumer to control how many records to receive at once and tune application performance.  

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Customer online orders now visible at POS

POS users can find and view online orders on the POS Sale screen. This offers a more seamless experience for both the customer and the POS operator, for whom there is no distinction between an order the customer made online and an order placed at a physical store. 

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PRODUCT INFORMATION MANAGEMENT

Easier parent-child items adjustments

Infinity now allows you to automate parent-child items adjustments. With just a few steps, you can assign a new parent item to existing child items with no need to manually perform stock on hand and cost adjustments.

Increase control over point of sale refunds

Using the Returns Extended module you can now define if a particular item is refundable or not, giving retailers the ability to prevent particular items from being refunded at the point of sale.

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Increase personalised customer promotions

The Infinity Rules Based Pricing interface has been enhanced to allow retailers to create and maintain customer-specific promotions that could previously only be maintained via integration. This allows you to create more personalised promotions and enhance customers’ purchasing experience.  

Allow staff to apply discretionary total sales discounts

Infinity Rules Based Pricing now allows you to manually apply total sale discounts to all items in a sale, including items that are already part of a promotion. This enhancement gives your staff more discretion when it comes to offering customer discounts; for example, when the customer signs up for your loyalty program.

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POINT OF SALE

Allocate refund items to correct location

POS users can now assign items to a specific location using the Returns Extended module. This enables more accurate and less time-consuming stock adjustment. POS users are prompted to allocate the item to the correct location at the time the goods are returned and are not tempted to keep the item to the side for location details to be entered later. 

Give customers summaries of epay transactions on a receipt

You can now print more than one epay transaction reference on a receipt. This means that if a customer buys more than one epay product it is easier to query the epay system and resolve any potential problems by easily identifying the items in the sale.  

Increase accuracy of cashout transaction records

POS receipts have been enhanced to display the word "Cashout" instead of "Change" when an operator processes a single EFTPOS transaction with a cashout, thereby providing a more accurate record of the transaction. If the transaction was a split payment, the word "Change" will not be replaced even if the cashout was part of the transaction.  

Provide staff with information when Wishlist provider unavailable

POS operators are now given more helpful error messages when the Wishlist provider is unreachable or the Wishlist service name is invalid. The length of time your system will wait to receive a response from the Wishlist provider can be configured, and the POS operator will be prompted when the timeout is met, allowing them to communicate more effectively with the customer when the Wishlist isn’t available.  

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MESSAGING

Easier management of bulk emails

Infinity Messaging can now send a configured number of emails per minute only. This enables retailers whose email service limits the number of emails per minute to automatically send a large volume of emails, such as monthly debtor statements, in managed chunks.

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TECHNOLOGY

MESM RPB SQL Runner is now .NET 4.6.2 compatible and does not depend on installation of .NET 3.5 Framework on the target PC.

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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 – May 2021

Here’s new functionality across the Infinity platform that will help you and your team deliver the frictionless experiences your customers expect.

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

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INFINITY API

Better management of products sold 

The Products API now supports an expanded range of Infinity’s standard product management functions. The additions increase control over the selling of certain products, to ensure that business rules can be met and the correct products are selected while processing transactions. 

 You can use it to define and view: 

• The sites where a product can be sold.   

• The date range between which a product can be sold. 

• Whether the product must be the only product in a transaction. 

• Whether each unit of a product must be on a different transaction line. 

• Whether the product can only be paid for using certain media. 

 Make future product changes 

The new Products Planned Changes API allows you to take advantage of Infinity’s batch updates function to make changes to products that will take effect at a future date and time. Customers whose master product details are managed in systems outside Infinity can use it to create, overwrite, retrieve and delete future-dated changes. 

 Offer multichannel payment options 

Infinity Sales Orders API now supports websites sending payments for existing orders. Customers can pay for their in-store orders online, giving them more flexibility when managing their orders and offering a seamless purchasing experience.  

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INVENTORY

Tailor labels printed for stores 

Infinity Labels now allows retailers to change the order that labels appear on screen, meaning you can print labels in the order that makes sense for your store layout. For example, you can decide to sort labels by description rather than by SKU. 

Easier de-allocation of stock from locations 

Finding items to de-allocate from a location has become easier and less time consuming now that stock items that are listed alphabetically on the Items Location screen, are also listed in that order on the De-allocate screen. To reduce errors and increase accuracy when de-allocating items from locations, Infinity can be configured so that all items are deselected by default and users need to select the items that are to be de-allocated. 

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ORDER MANAGEMENT

Tax-free items retain status throughout order process 

Infinity can now process tax-free sales orders from creation to completion. Items logged as tax-free through any channel will retain their tax status throughout the lifetime of the order. 

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PRICING & PROMOTIONS

Increase promotion options for branches 

Businesses that use branch clusters in conjunction with rules-based pricing can now configure Infinity to add items to pricing groups and promotional rules even if those items belong to a higher level cluster than the local branch, or belong to no cluster. This gives you greater flexibility in the promotions you can offer your customers. 

Remove inactive items from searches for more accurate promotions 

The Rules Based Pricing item search experience at the Back Office has been improved so that users no longer see a list of search results that includes inactive items when they are creating a promotional rule or adding items to a pricing group. This ensures that the correct products are added to promotions and prevents confusion when unexpected products are listed. 

Increase the number of discount options you offer customers 

Businesses that use customer discount groups as a way to group customers can now use these discount groups to create pricing rules for the TRADE condition type when using the standard rules-based pricing procedure. This extends upon the existing customer category options already available so that a customer can belong to two different groups, with pricing rules able to be defined for each.   

For example, a trade customer can receive a standard discount because they are a gold-tier customer, as well as discounts on a particular range of products because of their business type and discounts on a set of products that they have negotiated directly because of a piece of work they are doing. 

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POINT OF SALE

Deliver staff reminders more frequently 

You can now update the reminders your store staff see throughout the day so that they keep pace with the changing needs of your business. Until now, reminders would be updated only when users started up the POS. Now when you add a reminder at the Back Office or Head Office, it will load at the POS when the operator logs in and after a transaction is completed.  

Control the visibility of branch stock levels 

Multi-branch businesses that include standalone outlets can now prevent those outlets from seeing stock levels at other branches, allowing you to maintain branch confidentiality across your organisation.  

Tailor the way you view search results 

You now have a greater choice of how you view Advanced Items Search results at the POS. Instead of viewing search results as thumbnails you can now choose to see all results in a list, which is useful when dealing with numerous results. You can also customise the columns listing the search results and the search criteria in a way that makes sense to your business and add search filters for these columns. 

Improve visibility of cash positions in stores 

If your business uses MESM Cash Management, you can now use it to receipt cash from the bank for your float and deposit cash in the bank, giving your Back Office staff an easy way of recording these transactions. You can also keep on top of your current cash position by seeing the amounts at all cash drawers as well as in the safe at a glance. 

Increase control over returns refunds 

The Returns Extended functionality can now prevent POS users from editing the unit price when completing a returns transaction if they do not have the authority to do so. If the unit price needs to be changed, the operator will need to get permission from a more senior staff member, thereby helping to prevent incorrect refund amounts from being given. 

Give customers BP fuelcard payment option 

If you are a New Zealand fuel retailer using PC-EFTPOS, you can now offer BP fuelcard as a payment method, allowing you to add more customers to your customer base.  

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ADMINISTRATION

Increase security by increasing password strength 

Access to POS, BOS and HOS can now be made more secure through the use of password policy complexity. When implemented, your users must create strong passwords with at least three different types of character (they can use upper and lower case letters, numbers or special characters). 

More control for head office when closing branches 

You can now disable branches centrally from Infinity Head Office, allowing you to: 

• Reduce the reliance on manual tasks when closing a branch. 

• Gain greater control and flexibility when it comes to branch management. 

• Shut down a branch more quickly, safely and efficiently than ever before. 

Your staff have to be specifically given permission to do this, meaning that admin users can enjoy greater control over branch management while other users cannot accidently close a branch. 

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TECHNOLOGY

SQL 2019 users will no longer get a "Login failed for user error" when the correct SQL user and password are entered. This applies for the following scenarios: 

• When upgrading Infinity and the SQL user connecting to the database is not the standard Infinity SQL user. 

• When the Infinity SQL user already exists, you are installing Infinity again and the correct SQL password is supplied during installation. 

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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 – 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.