(This article appeared with the 2012 Review of Point-of-Sales systems.)
The need to offer more mobile applications for retailers is becoming more apparent. The act of a customer shopping in a brick and mortar store, then paying for their merchandise at that location is still relevant, but is rapidly being joined by other more flexible options such as Internet sales, area kiosks, telephone sales, and even trade shows and sidewalk sales.
As a result, salespeople are no longer tied to a cash register and are free to do what they were hired to do: sell. This flexibility, along with the need to tie kiosk sales, multiple store locations, or web sales to back office accounting software has posed a problem, particularly for smaller retailers, who have often spent many hours reconciling off-site, Internet, and telephone sales to their existing AR.
That reconciliation just got a lot easier with the latest functionality added to the Sage Exchange payments platform from Sage North America. Sage Exchange is designed to help small to mid-sized businesses (SMBs) manage their entire payments ecosystem from a central location, including connecting payment devices to their accounting software. Sage Exchange offers a direct interface between a variety of devices, including credit/debit card terminals, electronic check terminals, and other point-of-sale (POS) devices. Sage Exchange will also integrate with mobile devices such as phones or tablets.
Sage Exchange works with nearly all Sage Accounting products as well as a variety of third party applications. Sage Exchange is PCI (Payment Card Industry) certified and offers users a safe, secure environment for integrated payment processing by eliminating the need for manual payment processing of each sale. Eliminating tedious data entry also reduces error occurrence.
Sage Exchange also provides retailers with up-to-date, real-time payment processing, while offering users a consolidated view of all payments processed. The introduction of the Sage Exchange portal provides customers with a simple three-step approach to connect payment devices with accounting and ERP software. The interactive Sage Dashboard within the new portal offers users the ability to easily customize the interface to suit their needs. The My Dashboard option, at the top of the screen, provides users with complete customization capability, allowing users to customize tiles to represent frequently used features.
My Connections is where all components that will use Sage Exchange are set up for use; all components need to be registered with Sage Exchange in order to be used. Reporting options are excellent, and managers can run reports using any web browser. All reports are processed in real time.
Accountants helping clients manage various businesses can have one copy of Sage Exchange and view the data on all of them from the portal. Each client can have access to only his business’ payments data using roles-based permissions, but the accountant can easily see payments data for all his clients.
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