LavaBlast has created an easy to use point of sale, adapted to the franchisor's needs.
Ease of use
Retail franchisors need a point of sale to process in-store transactions. Basic cash registers have many limitations in terms of inventory control and traceability. Furthermore, without software, managing a frequent buyer program is extremely cumbersome.
LavaBlast point of sale was designed to be appealing and easy to use. We’ve limited our feature set to the core features required by our franchisors. We are not commercializing our point of sale as a one-size-fits-all tool. Indeed, our clients have informed us that most commercial off-the-shelf point of sale software packs in so many features that the cashier never uses that using the POS becomes overwhelming. By narrowing the feature set, we dramatically cut training costs. We target franchisors operating retail stores that need to scan products and product receipts. Our first clients are in the child-related industry and our POS system reflects this fact. One of our clients operates a hybrid store which combines the teddy bear stuffing experience with a do-it-yourself ice cream parlor; we've developed a hybrid POS solution for this store.
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Skin
We can create custom skins for the point of sale. If you wish to have your point of sale branded according to your corporate standards, don't hesitate to mention it. Because LavaBlast’s point of sale was designed from the ground up with skinning in mind, the changes are limited to having a graphic artist review the color schemes and images. Take a look at our web design section to see how our graphic artist works.
Integrated
LavaBlast's point of sale is connected to FranchiseBlast via an Internet connection. If you are franchise owner, you configure all the suggested retail prices of your items through FranchiseBlast. Then each store owner can change the price for his own store in the centralized web interface in FranchiseBlast. Once FranchiseBlast updated for this particular store, price changes will be immediatly applied in the POS.
The sales module is tailor-made for your industry and cashiers are guided through the simple business processes you define via a user-friendly interface. We offer a core set of features which can be enhanced as desired. The sales module ties into all the other modules listed below following specific use cases; we wish to avoid open ended situations where the cashier is presented with too many options. An example of an industry adaptation is the selection of a teddy bear birth certificate created on our kiosk directly in the sale module.
Customizable
The LavaBlast point of sale contains various ways to add products to a transaction. The first one is obviously scanning an item with a barcode scanner. What is interesting here is that we can include your own business process in the point of sale. For example, Teddy Mountain franchise prints a birth certificate of the teddy bear they are selling through the point of sale, complete with a picture of the owner. This process is all integrated in the point of sale and is aneasy task for the cashier to perform.
Moreover, the cashier can add items to the transaction through a special menu designed for your business. For example, we see an example here where we defined a menu for the Pickle Bob’s Ice Cream and Treatery. By creating an item in this menu, the cashier can customize it to the customer liking.
Once again, these menus are completely customizable and can be edited in FranchiseBlast. The menu for each store is controlled by the franchisor. This way, the franchisor has control over what their stores are selling. You can have a complete fleet of stores that are always synchronized as for which products they are selling and not selling. A franchisor could change an item’s picture or description in FranchiseBlast and all stores will pick up these changes without user intervention.
Multiple vendors
Franchisors often sell products from multiple vendors and need to know exactly how well each of the product lines are selling. The data produced by the point of sale produces can be used in FranchiseBlast to produce reports broken down per vendor. This way a franchise business can keep track of their best selling products lines and predict future demand for certain products according to past trends.
Order reception and inventory management
If the franchisor has a controlled supply chain, the point of sales offers automatic order reception. If franchisees place orders through a LavaBlast system, it is possible to remove most of the grunt work required for order reception.
Frequent buyer program
We support a frequent buyer program which gives back points on every purchase. These points can be re-used to buy certain products at a later date. We also support gift cards via this same process; our gift cards are identified to individuals at the time of the sale.
This gives the customer the added assurance that if they lose the gift card, they don’t lose their investment. The same frequent buyer program is used to associate birthday party reservations to customers and accept deposits.
This information can then be used in FranchiseBlast to create reports using Google Maps to know exactly where your clients are coming from and to help you make strategic decisions for marketing. The franchisee can see exactly where their customers live and where which areas could benefit from more publicity, to attract new customers.
Connecting this with sales information for each user, you can have a heat map of your town to see exactly where your best customers are coming from. The possibilities are endless. The franchisor can evaluate whether or not a franchisee prospect would hurt an existing franchisee if a new store was opened at a particular location. All this information is available in FranchiseBlast so that it does not clutter the POS user interface and it can be accessed from the comfort of your home.
Store Events (Birthday Parties)
Should you wish to organize parties or any other events which require a date book, you could benefit from LavaBlast’s event booking interface. Booking a new event is as easy as creating an appointment in Microsoft Outlook. Once the date and time are defined, the cashier enters information about the event. The store owner can ask for a deposit for any store event that will be held in its store.
Our events module allows for the reservation of birthday parties or other appointments by reserving a particular room, salon chair, or individual for a defined time period. The system allows for refundable deposits. Although originally designed to be a child birthday party reservation system where each child is charged a fixed price for a particular experience, the module is extensible to support other industries.
Store events are connected with the frequent buyer program; this enables the generation of reports and yearly reminders to repeat the event (birthday parties).
The party module enables a client to pay a fixed amount of money to be able to buy a fixed amount of items. For example a client could decide to organize party for 15 children and would want each child to be able to buy merchandise for a fixed price of $20 each, for a total of $300. When the children are having the party, they choose items according to the party package and the point of sale will know that because those kids are having a party, the total of the whole party can't go over $300. This process is augmented with a few business rules to ensure that the selected items are included in the purchased party package.
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Cash Balancing
Our cash balancing module used at the end of the day keeps track of expected totals in the cash drawer. The balancing information from previous days is preserved for future consultation.
Labels
Our point of sale software includes a label creation module which can print out labels and barcodes in a variety of standard Avery formats on a local or network color printer.
The templates are custom-built for your franchise and are intended to be used in stores with a limited set of different products where it is desirable to print item pictures on the labels. If required, we can also interface to specialized barcode printers should the volume of labels be greater.
Reports
We offer reports as desired directly in the POS related to particular item sales, stock quantities, monthly totals, cash balancing, and even frequent buyer activity tracking.
We also keep audit trails of what all cashiers do on the POS which facilitates detecting odd cashier activities in addition to reducing debugging times. Thanks to the electronic journal, LavaBlast can re-create a complex sequence of activities which led to unexpected behaviour on its development machines without having to resort to hearsay from the cashier or franchisee.
Reports are also available inside FranchiseBlast.
Reliable in-store store POS or flexible online point of sale
Our point of sale software was created using web-based technologies. Our clients all have a secured web server running in their stores, which communicates with our servers on a periodical basis. Should the Internet go down, the POS continues to work without interruption. However, being a web-based technology, we do have the option of deploying it on our servers and offer you a fully-hosted, online point of sale software system.
Offsite backups and data warehouse
LavaBlast’s POS is automatically backed up to an offsite location every 24h. In case of a fire or hardware failure, this ensures that no data is lost and that operations can be resumed quickly. Furthermore, the data is accumulated in a central data warehouse which is used by FranchiseBlast for reporting and analysis purposes. See FranchiseBlast for more information.
Remote deployment
LavaBlast remotely manages the POS software, eliminating the need for onsite visits, except for initial hardware installation or hardware failure. Moreover, remote store management enables LavaBlast to deploy updates to stores over the internet instead of having to go through lengthy installations. Obviously, for stability reasons, the POS software is not immediately updated when a new version is available: a candidate store first receives the new version to test its reliability for a few days or weeks before it is distributed to the other stores. A problem affecting any particular store can be diagnosed, fixed, and deployed in a matter of minutes, allowing issues to be contained very quickly.