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.

Three things to consider when implementing click–­and–collect

This story was originally posted April 3rd and updated September 1st 2020

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Global COVID-19 restrictions have brought forward e-commerce growth by up to ten years and mandated focus on health and safety.

Whether you’re improving your existing service or introducing it as new, click-and-collect is a smart addition to every retailer’s fulfilment toolkit as consumers move online and demand contact-less fulfilment options.

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Click-and-collect lets you continue selling and getting your in-store goods into consumers hands, and it takes the pressure off warehouse deliveries. 

In the current environment, click-and-collect can also help ensure staff safety because you can set things up to be contactless. 

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Here are our top three things to consider if you’re thinking about implementing click-and-collect:  

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1. Business process and social distancing

To optimise physical distance between your team and customers, set up an alert and collection system. For instance, when an order is ready, contact the customer with a specific time to collect - a good platform will enable you to automate this process. And set up a designated safe zone where customers can wait for store staff to bring their purchases to them with minimal contact. 

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2. Keep a check on service levels

Choose a unified commerce platform so you have a click-and-collect dashboard that updates in real time and can be monitored from anywhere, including while your sales manager is working from home. It should provide an all-of-business view of sales and fulfilment and automatically alert the right people when a sale may not be able to be fulfilled. So you can tell customers right away, arrange for stock to be transferred from another store, or offer delivery instead. 

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3. Make it consistent and easy across all channels

There’s so much changing for retail reps right now, including different processes that are mandated by retailers and by the government. Keeping the in-store process consistent and easy will reduce stress and errors.

In Infinity, orders from any channel are processed in the same simple way by your in-store team – whether the sale is made through your call centre, a mobile app or your ecommerce site. One consistent process saves time, reduces errors and frees your team up to focus on your customer rather than the transaction.

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I’d be happy to discuss click-and-collect in more detail and answer any questions you have about getting it up and running. Contact me here or through LinkedIn.

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.

Why unified commerce is the nirvana of omnichannel

This post was originally published on 3 March 2020 and updated on 21 July 2020

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We’ve seen a dramatic shift to digital channels during the pandemic. Many retailers had to take a  ‘just get something done’ approach to creating seamless customer experiences that span channels.

Now they’re struggling with omnichannel set-ups that simply link digital and physical systems together, and they don’t have the ability to keep pace with changing consumer behaviours.

But omnichannel should not be the end goal. It’s just one approach to getting a single view of your customers that will help you deliver unified experiences. 

Instead, a unified commerce platform will break down your channel silos and move your retail business toward the holy grail of holistic, real-time, personalised customer experiences spanning in-store, online and everywhere in between.

To help explain why unified commerce is the nirvana of omnichannel, here’s a look at where we are now and where we’re going.

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Multi-channel

To meet customer expectations for safety and convenience, retailers are giving customers access to new mobile and online channels. Each touchpoint and channel operates independently, with separate people, processes and technologies existing in functional silos.

But when you only add and don’t actually integrate new channels with the rest of your organisation, you create bad service experiences that frustrate internal teams and customers.

Silos mean that your customers have to deal with inconsistencies and gaps, such as incomplete sales histories, different tones of voice or having to start conversations afresh in each channel. These silos inevitably lead to disappointment and frustration, a lack of trust and even a sense that your organisation is incompetent.

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Omnichannel

With an omnichannel approach, customers can access different channels to interact with your brand, and you finally have a single view of the customer, however, your channels are still operating in functional silos.

That means most attempts to offer unified experiences fall short. 

You could be struggling with legacy technologies that have been customised and are infrequently updated, and then you try to bolt-on new digital solutions that don’t easily integrate. These omnichannel systems are fragile, inefficient and costly to maintain.

And things can easily unravel. Adding new channels, faster fulfilment and new payment options can lead to a torrent of inconsistent and inaccurate data which cannot be shared without significant investments in data integration.

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Unified commerce 

With a unified commerce retail management system (RMS), you can achieve retail nirvana by creating immersive and frictionless experiences for customers across all channels.

A unified commerce platform gives you a single source of truth for inventory and customer data. With this one view of the customer, and all customer channels and engagement points connected in real-time, you can deliver a personalised and consistent customer experience. 

This capability has been a game changer for our clients.

It eliminates the customer journey pain points and amplifies the ‘wow’ moments. Now you can treat each customer as an individual, all the time – one person with one account, interacting with one brand.  

Unified commerce can benefit your business in many ways:

• It provides a stable backbone by acting as the hub for all your channels, reducing integration and operating costs, while increasing efficiency and accuracy. 

• It’s also your platform for innovating – a springboard for adding new channels and services, giving you the ability to take advantage of new capabilities and deliver results at a speed and scale that unachievable within a traditional omnichannel model.

• It gives you total control over all your inventory and lets you create seamless and personalised purchasing, payment and fulfilment options across ‘endless aisle’ shopping, fast (eg 30-minute) click-and-collect, kerbside pickup, store-to-door, shoppable screens, kiosks and hyper-personalised loyalty offers.

• You can deliver frictionless experiences and let customers access your entire product range from any location, including stores, online, mobile, shoppable screens, pop-ups, stores within stores, virtual showrooms, social channels, call centres and more.

• And our savviest clients are now investing in new customer-facing technologies, like chatbots, mobile apps and AI. Some are pioneering contextual commerce – the ability to seamlessly implement purchase opportunities into everyday activities (such as Shoppable Instagram and Facebook). 

The end result is the ability to deliver the personal, ubiquitous and unified experiences your customers expect, fostering loyalty, driving growth and improving profitability.

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Your next step

We’d love to support your journey to unified commerce nirvana. Get in touch and let’s chat about your retail future.

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For more on unified commerce and why it’s the future of retail, download this free guide to unified commerce.

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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.

Triquestra’s operations during New Zealand’s Alert Level 2

With the move to Alert Level 2 across New Zealand, our office reopened on Monday 18 May.

• Our people are working both on-site in our office and from home, serving our clients remotely.

• Our updated health and safety policies include limiting the number of people on-site at any one time, implementing strict hygiene practices and contact tracing for everyone.

• While business air travel remains suspended during Level 2, our people can now attend external meetings if they feel comfortable to do so, and you are welcome to visit our office. We’ll continue to make the most of videoconferencing platforms to meet and collaborate with you, and all Triquestra meetings will include the option to join remotely.

• We’ll re-evaluate our approach when the Government reviews Alert Level 2 on Monday 25 May.

• We’ll continue to keep you updated on our operations and ways we are helping retailers create new omnichannel experiences that meet the emerging needs of customers.

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Thanks again for your continued support and collaboration. We look forward to seeing some of you in the not-too-distant future!

Infinity helps Liquorland get click-and-collect ready for lockdown in less than a week

At the beginning of New Zealand’s COVID-19 Level 4 lockdown, liquor stores closed because they weren’t deemed an essential service right away. That didn’t stop the Liquorland and Triquestra teams from working together immediately to get a tuned up click-and-collect service ready for reopening in Level 3.

Brett O’Hanlon, Liquorland’s Finance and IT Manager says, “We had new click-and-collect functionality built, tested and running within a week to make sure that everything would be as efficient and contactless as possible for store staff and customers.”

Infinity’s flexibility and the collaborative effort has resulted in a click-and-collect process that’s delighting franchisees and customers alike. And the quick action has transformed click-and-collect from the smallest Liquorland ‘store’ to helping run the turnover of around 129 stores.  

Nutrien Ag Solutions selects Triquestra to provide premium retail experiences

Leading Australian agriculture retailer will standardise its retail operations to give customers seamless experiences using Infinity 

We’re thrilled to announce that Nutrien Ag Solutions has chosen Triquestra as its strategic partner for the standardisation of its point of sale systems.

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Nutrien Ag Solutions has a goal of being Australia’s ag retailer of the future and is committed to creating a consistent brand experience to meet the changing needs of customers, with a focus on digital solutions and ecommerce initiatives that support its network of stores and growers.

Formed from the merger of the Landmark and Ruralco businesses in late 2019, Nutrien Ag Solutions is a subsidiary of Nutrien, the world’s largest provider of crop inputs and services. The combined operation has a network of 290 corporate-owned stores, 165 joint ventures and other retail, plus 320 independent rural supplies retailers and a suite of other businesses.

Triquestra’s Infinity unified commerce platform will be Nutrien Ag Solutions’ point of sale system in all of its retail stores across Australia.

Nutrien will benefit from a modern retail management system that will keep pace with shifting customer expectations and new technologies, and offer the flexibility to quickly add new stores, channels and touchpoints when needed. Infinity will integrate with Nutrien’s other technology solutions, including SAP ERP.

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Are you looking for ways to keep pace with shifting customer expectations?

Contact us and see how a unified commerce platform can help you merge physical and digital channels to deliver the safe, convenient and localised services consumers now expect.