STAR Purchasing & Receiving
Retail STAR makes maintaining a perpetual inventory effortless. If you were to try and maintain an accurate inventory manually, you
would have to duplicate your efforts for each inventory item every time you purchase, receive, price, transfer, sell, and record the
results into your accounting books. Retail STAR eliminates all of this duplication by using the original inventory information you
enter into your purchase orders and then propagating this information to all of the other areas of your business. Now, you can enter
the information once and let Retail STAR do the rest of the work for you.
Purchase orders can be created quickly for a vendor by either typing the product information or choosing from a list of products for
the selected vendor. In purchasing as well as throughout the system, the user can select the question mark button or the drop-down menu key
to see a list of available choices. They can then select from the list or add new items (such as vendors, departments, size runs, and
inventory classifications). This one-key lookup feature makes Retail STAR® unique and very easy to use.
When ordering items, there is a two-dimensional size grid ("smart grid") which can also include color and store. Some industry
experts would refer to this as a four-dimensional grid. We prefer to think of it as a two-dimensional size grid with optional color
and store components. Needless to say, if you are purchasing softgood items, this matrix format will be familiar to you. If you are
a hardgoods retailer with multiple locations, you can also take advantage of this "smart grid" by creating distributions for your
other store locations right on the purchase order, saving you yet another step in managing your inventory. The system then gives
you the option of either printing a consolidated purchase order with a single ship-to location or generating multiple purchase
orders with a different ship-to, allowing you to request drop shipments from the vendor.
When creating new inventory items that have multiple sizes, Retail STAR® can employ a single SKU (Style) structure, or you can set
up your system to assign a separate SKU automatically for each product. You can also make up your own SKU or item numbers. Whether
you choose the single SKU approach or assign separate SKU numbers for each size, in no case does the system unnecessarily duplicate
information. An item that comes in 100 sizes and has the same vendor, description, department, etc., would only have this information
stored in the database once, rather than 100 times. This greatly reduces your data entry time, increases the performance of the software,
and makes the various reports contained within the software much more meaningful.
Once your orders have been entered into the Retail STAR system, the software will help you manage your buying process and purchasing
budgets. You can choose to print your purchase orders and mail them to your vendors, or you can fax them to your vendors straight from
your computer (third party fax utility required). You can generate outstanding purchase order reports summarized by any of the inventory
attributes over any date range that you specify (see reporting section). As an example, you can run an outstanding purchase order report
showing you which COD orders are scheduled to arrive next week. This will alert you to how much money you will need on hand to receive
those orders. Or, you can choose to see all of your outstanding orders summarized by department. This would allow you to quickly see
how your orders are distributed by department and insure that your store will be properly stocked for each department.
If you want more detailed information on your purchases, you can also generate customized purchasing reports with our built-in report
writer, ReportSTAR. ReportSTAR is an extremely powerful reporting tool (see reporting section) and is a report writer built exclusively
for retailers. Within ReportSTAR you can use one of the built-in purchasing reports or create your own to manage an open-to-buy process
or provide information to outside merchandise consulting companies.
Once you receive the physical goods that you have ordered, you can use the Receiving module to quickly receive them into the system.
Receiving can be done manually by typing in the received quantities or automatically by exception against the original purchase order.
A third option is to use a hand-held PDT (Portable Data Terminal). Using this type of scanner allows you to simply open the box and scan
the goods into the system.
Price tags with barcodes can be generated in any size, shape, or color, with any information desired. Store logos or other graphical
information may be easily included by scanning them into the system. This gives your store a professional, customized look and increases
your brand awareness.
Once items on a purchase order have been received, they are maintained in your inventory and appear in the appropriate accounts within
your general ledger. Receiving vouchers are also posted to the Accounts Payable module for processing and matching once you receive the
invoice for the order. A check can be printed instantaneously for the order when you have confirmed receipt of the goods against the
invoice.
As you can see, Retail STAR makes inventory management effortless by entering the information once on a purchase order when ordering
the goods. After that, the system will do the rest of the work for you, all the way to producing your financial statements.
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