Non-profit plant nursery and retailer improves point of sale efficiency and accuracy with Infinity

“I’ve implemented Infinity at both ends of the spectrum – from a large, highly risk-averse government department through to this small, community-based retail operation. It’s a fabulous system that works out-of-the-box, and you can easily scale and add new services when you are ready.”

Clare Pinder, Selmes Garden Trust trustee and volunteer

Selmes Garden Centre upgraded its retail management system to increase profitability and provide more jobs for people with disabilities.

Established in Blenheim, New Zealand in 2008, the non-profit Selmes Garden Trust is a plant nursery and garden centre staffed by community volunteers and 21 people with disabilities. It gives disabled people meaningful employment and the opportunity to live an ‘ordinary’ life, with financial independence, a nurturing environment and valuable social relationships. 

In 2019, the Selmes trustees recognised that they needed a modern retail management system that could improve sales capabilities, foster customer loyalty and increase profitability. 

Clare Pinder, a Selmes trustee and volunteer, explains that they decided to partner with Triquestra because she knew from her previous experience that we could provide the platform and expertise Selmes needed. “The Triquestra management and team generously agreed to give us the software, support and implementation at no cost to the Trust.”

Scaling from enterprises to SMEs

Clare first partnered with Triquestra when working as a senior project manager at the New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) ten years ago. 

Following an RFP process, the Department had selected Triquestra to implement Infinity point of sale software to process, streamline and record transactions for passports, births, deaths and marriages, and citizenship applications.

“We had a tight deadline to ensure PCI-DSS compliance for payment cards like Visa and Mastercard,” explains Clare. “So there was considerable pressure for the implementation to be successful from day one.”

“And it was,” she adds. “Infinity is such a tried and true, tested and stable solution that I didn’t expect any problems and we didn’t get any.”

She explains that the Selmes implementation was a very different scenario. 

“At the DIA, I worked full time for four months with the support of a project team. At Selmes, I didn’t have the luxury of corporate resources. I had to completely rely on the Triquestra team’s expertise. They always said that Infinity could be installed and trained remotely, that the out-of-the box solution could handle every scenario, and there was very little that the software couldn’t do in a retail environment. Now I know they’re right. Infinity is such a comprehensive, well-tested and mature system that there really isn't anything they haven't come across. And they made the rollout so easy.”

Training boosts Selmes staff acceptance

Prior to the system going live at Selmes, Clare and the team conducted remote training to ensure they could easily use Infinity and be productive from day one. 

“There's a really good training mode with Infinity that lets you play with the system. And it can answer any question you throw at it. There was a fear factor – people don’t like change,” Clare adds. “However, Infinity is so intuitive. After being trained by Triquestra, I had individual sessions with our staff and they all picked it up within an hour.”

Automating retail transactions

Selmes now has a modern retail system with the flexibility to quickly and easily add new capabilities. “You need an off-the-shelf system because a completely tailored solution will have lots of integrations that need checking and are costly to maintain. With Infinity, the chances of things going wrong are very diminished,” says Clare.

Freeing staff from manual tasks

Infinity has automated previously manual transactions and compiles up-to-date sales information.

“All of our processes have improved,” explains Clare. “The labour intensive and time consuming end-of-day cash and sales balancing is now automated, we’re less prone to errors and we now have the ability to analyse sales for better decision-making.”

The efficiencies from Infinity mean staff can spend more time helping and serving customers and working on other tasks in the garden centre.

The next phase will be to integrate Infinity with Xero so that sales will be automatically entered into the accounting system for invoicing, reconciliation and reporting.

Increasing profitability

“Now that we've been trading for a couple of months with Infinity, we can run analysis over the sales to see where we should be concentrating our efforts, where our margins are good, and where they're not,” says Clare. 

“I'm very hopeful we will increase profitability by at least 10%. I’m quietly confident we can do even more. For us, profitability is everything. If we can increase our profit, then we can employ more people with disabilities. That would be amazing.”

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