As a cloud-based retail platform with real-time reporting, Vend offers up insights into a retailer’s operations that would otherwise be readily overlooked. For a data-driven accounting and consultancy firm like Growthwise, Vend’s real-time data becomes a powerful asset for consulting with retail clients.
We recently caught up with the amazing Steph Hinds to find out just how she has leveraged Vend to help her retail clients grow their businesses.
Why did you choose to partner with Vend?
Business Consulting for us is 100% of what we do. We became Vend Advisors and started recommending Vend to our clients so we could have access to real time data. Without data we really can’t advise clients on where they are going wrong or what part’s of the business are doing really well. Having Vend as part of our systems arsenal allows us to pick up issues for clients straight away.
How do you leverage Vend for your consulting?
The data we get from Vend certainly does help in our consultancy efforts. It’s one thing to be able to tell a client GP margins overall but with the real time live data that allows us to drill into margins per product or per category of product we can really help steer the business in the right direction. The Integration with Xero means that we have the full picture on how the business is performing as well. We can then compare year on year, month on month and overall business performance at the click of a button. The best thing about this is no data entry between systems!
We also love the sales data that is so easily accessible in Vend. Having the data in Vend really allows us to ask questions about why products are not selling or why certain things sell better on certain days. Asking those questions then allows us to help clients tweak what they are doing and monitor the results. Looking at daily sales trends for a lot of businesses is great.
What about Vend add-ons?
Some of the most useful data comes from the add-on solutions! Seeing Vend and Deputy integrate so we can track sales to wages percentages or looking at Swarm traffic data with sales data is invaluable. We can quickly talk to clients if wages are growing and sales aren’t and work on a strategy to bring those back into line.
Care to share a retail success story?
We have quite a few good retail success stories. MisKonduct Klothing is a perfect example. Emma the owner had setup to do market stalls on the weekend and had a small online store. She now has a very fast growing retail outlet as well as her online store and sells to clients all over the world. Having a system like Vend has allowed her to look at stock trends, sales trends, know when to put Sales stock out and also review her buying habits. Not to mention the integration with online sales.
Learn how you can become a Vend Advisor and leverage real-time data to improve your consulting practices.
About Tara Benedict
A former retailer (and unabashed nerd) who daydreamed about integrated POS software, Tara now delightedly recruits, promotes, and enables Vend's wonderful channel of add-ons and partners. An ardent sharer of Vend news and events, connect with Tara on Twitter, LinkedIn or Google+ and never miss an opportunity to meet up with the affable Vend team.
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