Open Forum

The Norton Museum is reopening its store in a newly constructed building. We are using the opportunity to upgrade our POS system. Every software program or application seems to have its own set of benefits AND shortcomings. I wonder if any of the community would share impressions of the systems you are using to run registers, process purchase orders,  and track inventory? And if you are happy with how they are working for you?

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Matthew Bird
Norton Museum of Art
West Palm Beach, FL
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We use QuickBooks POS for our store and general entry. It is very intuitive/user friendly. You can have different levels of use and set up each users home screen with quick tabs for only the functions they need. Item entry, PO creation/accepting and inventory lookup are all very easy. It will even print you price tags, with bar codes if you opt to have a scanner. Reports can be run with generic attributes or you can create your own and save them. As someone who has not used a lot of POS systems I found I learned the system very quickly and can train my Visitor Services team on basic functionality in just an hour or so.

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Christine Ham
Membership & Visitor Experience Supervisor
Whatcom Museum
Bellingham WA
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The Museum Store Association- MSA (www.museumstoreassociation.org) will be publishing its 2018 Retail Industry Report very shortly. Among its hundreds of benchmarks and KPIs is the following about the Point of Sale Systems used by respondents.

Counterpoint 24%
TAM 13%
Retail Pro 10%
Siriusware 3%
Celerant 2%
Teamwork Retail 1%
Springboard 1%
Other 47% (This category includes Quickbooks, Square, Microsoft RMS, Lightspeed and a host of other small and limited scope systems.)

In the spirit of full disclosure, Andoniadis Retail Services is the sponsor of the report but did not participate in the collection, tabulation, analysis or dissemination of the results.

 

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Andrew Andoniadis
Museum Store Consultant
Andoniadis Retail Services
Andrew@MuseumStoreConsult.com
(503) 629-9279
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Original Message:
Sent: 05-11-2018 12:31 PM
From: Christine Ham
Subject: Gift Shop Register Software

We use QuickBooks POS for our store and general entry. It is very intuitive/user friendly. You can have different levels of use and set up each users home screen with quick tabs for only the functions they need. Item entry, PO creation/accepting and inventory lookup are all very easy. It will even print you price tags, with bar codes if you opt to have a scanner. Reports can be run with generic attributes or you can create your own and save them. As someone who has not used a lot of POS systems I found I learned the system very quickly and can train my Visitor Services team on basic functionality in just an hour or so.

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Christine Ham
Membership & Visitor Experience Supervisor
Whatcom Museum
Bellingham WA
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