Closing the Gap in Your ERP with a Point-of-Sale Integration

Closing the Gap in Your ERP with a Point-of-Sale Integration
Simply put, ERPs increase productivity, allowing companies to move product faster, process orders more quickly, manage vendors more effectively, and handle accounting more smoothly.
by Square Jan 10, 2019 — 3 min read
Closing the Gap in Your ERP with a Point-of-Sale Integration

This article was written by Eugene Tsay, Partnerships

Today’s enterprise business leaders understand the value of integrated business processes. That’s why more and more small and medium-size businesses are relying on enterprise resource planning systems, or ERPs.

Simply put, ERPs increase productivity. Because they combine such processes as finance, accounting, purchasing, and human resources management across departments and locations, ERPs allow companies to move products faster, process orders more quickly, manage vendors more effectively, and handle accounting more smoothly.

And because the data is integrated, ERPs can deliver analytics and reporting that provide business leaders with more meaningful business intelligence. It allows for better decision making that typically leads to even greater productivity.

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But for all the impact ERP systems can have on productivity and efficiency, most leave out one of the most vital business processes: the point-of-sale.

Missed opportunities

The point-of-sale (POS) is the primary entry point for key data; sales transactions, customer information, and ongoing inventory adjustments all come through your POS. Having front-of-house POS remain separate from the back-office ERP means missed opportunities that could undermine the organization.

The most obvious missed opportunity is the failure to connect sales transactions with accounting. But a point-of-sale is about more than just transactions and payments. A POS that isn’t fully integrated with the ERP could mean:

Stopping short of a full integration means trying to force these two systems to play well together. That can result in the same kinds of inefficiencies and duplicated processes that ERPs aim to resolve in the first place. Reconciling the two systems can involve cumbersome spreadsheet exports and data imports that take up unnecessary staff time and can easily introduce error.

An integrated solution

Square and SAP Business One have been working together to solve this problem. Together, we’ve developed and deployed an integrated ERP and point of sale that work together as a single system. This provides greater control of operations across multiple locations, more efficient processes through data centralization, and improved data reporting.

Square and SAP have found that companies that operate their POS and ERP as a single integrated system get much more from both together than from either system alone. By integrating sales transaction and customer data with catalog, inventory, payments, purchasing, accounting, and employee management, businesses can profoundly streamline and simplify operations, even with many locations. At the same time they gain access to real-time integrated data for better decision making.

Central to this integration is the syncing of key point-of-sale retail data with the ERP. Here’s how it works:

Because Square offers hardware for checkout counters as well as mobile hardware for on-the-go transactions, pop-ups, and line-busting, ERP integration means that inventory and other key data remain synced no matter where transactions occur. Square also offers an eCommerce API, which, together with in-person transactions, can enable a merchant to offer a true omnichannel retail experience.

The business intelligence yielded by combining data and reporting leads to positive management outcomes, including:

An ERP alone is a powerful business tool. With an integrated point of sale, it becomes an even more powerful system that yields smoother processes and detailed, actionable insights, for fast, effective decision making.

To learn more about the Square integration with SAP Business One, contact [email protected].

Square
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