Here’s everything that’s new in Infinity to help you and your team work more efficiently and offer better experiences to your customers. To find out more about any of these enhancements and add them to your Infinity platform, contact us. If you’d like to get each ‘New in Infinity’ in your inbox, sign up to our newsletter.
INVENTORY
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.
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.
ORDER MANAGEMENT
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.
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.
CUSTOMERS & LOYALTY
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.
We’ve improved the calculations that are used when you create surprise and delight adjustments to a customer’s prepay balance. The messages that both customers and POS operators see will more accurately reflect the savings that customers receive.
Fraud prevention has been improved. Prepay accounts were being locked sooner than they should because preauthorised debit transaction activities were being counted towards standard debit transactions. Now only debits that aren’t related to preauthorisations contribute to the fraud protection lock-out feature.
To remove confusion, the dropdown list of available fuel CPL rules is now restricted to active rules that have not yet expired so users can no longer select expired or inactive rules by mistake.
Enabling or disabling offers configured against offer templates has been updated. When an offer template is active and the offer template has offers configured, those offers cannot be disabled. When an offer template starts in the future, and the offer template has disabled offers, those offers cannot be re-enabled. This update prevents a mismatch between the offer templates and the offer logic which made them not work.
The process for editing fuel CPL rules has been improved. When the user selects the ‘Save’ button, they go back to the CPL discount rules main list which indicates that they’ve completed their action successfully. Previously the user wasn’t sure whether the rule change had been made.
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.
REPORTING & ANALYTICS
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 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.
POINT OF SALE
The workflow for customers using the Infinity Loyalty prepay account and check-in functions 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 sale information that’s sent to the Digifort DVR system will also 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.
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.
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.
TECHNOLOGY
Infinity now supports installations using Microsoft SQL Server 2019 so you can use the latest database engine available from Microsoft. Infinity still has support for SQL 2012, 2014, 2016, and 2017, and ships with SQL 2014 as standard.
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.
The logging within the fuel CPL API has been extended 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.
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 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.
Caching has been added to the Fly Buys loyalty customer search function at the POS for speedier customer transactions.
We’ve resolved an issue with the automated daily database maintenance, so where configured, the daily tasks keep the system tuned for optimal operation.
