What benefits has your business seen as a result of using automation?

[maxpete]

Hey everyone!

ICYMI: Square recently released the Future of Commerce 2024 report. This report will give you inspiration, tactics, and tools to future-proof your business. Make sure to download your copy here.

In FOC 2024, the greatest benefit retailers have seen from investing in automation is an improved customer experience (47%), especially for retailers in the US (50%) and those retail businesses that earn $500,000 or more a year (51%). Forty-five percent of retailers have seen greater employee retention and increased profit as a result of their automation investments. Some examples of this include using automation for repetitive admin tasks like making reservations or checking product inventory.

What benefits, if any, has your business seen as a result of using technology or automation to decrease staff's hands-on time?

Excited to see all of your replies!

[maxpete]

Tagging @JTPets, @tam-rvc  & @Twiggy here as I know y'all some have good insights around this!

[TCSlaguna]

I used to spend several hours a week calculating best selling products, sales trends, seasonality, employee staffing needs and much more. Now I can see all that data on the Square Dashboard app and make well-informed decisions for the company. 

Also having an inventory system that tells me what is running low and recommends a purchase order saves us a lot of time. 

[maxpete]

That is great to hear! Glad that the Square Dashboard app has been able to help save you time with this. 

[BofBArtStudio]

Same here. 

We love how easy it is to know what inventory to order and when.

And the Sales Trends report makes it clear how to staff.

[DLRosenberg]

We really haven't found any automations that have helped us. We are really hoping to keep the inventory management within the Square universe but we really need help with inventory management. We often find ourselves spending so much labor looking for inventory because we often don't know where something is physically located in our store (which has many floors).

It would be amazing if there was an automation for this! 

[maxpete]

An automation for this does sound great! 

[Lovewell]

@maxpete Square loyalty! We love using it and it works extremely well for automatically awarding the correct amount of stars to a customer for a transaction! And allowing the discount to come off automatically when someone decides they want to use it! We also are beginning to use a scanner for our register to be able to scan the retail merchandise we have instead of searching for things! And being able to see our sales reports in the dashboard and see what products and categories are selling has been amazing!

[maxpete]

This is so cool to hear!

[TCSlaguna]

This reminds me, we need to setup Square Email Marketing automations. Birthday rewards, long time no see discounts, and so much more. 

[BofBArtStudio]

we have those automations set and it is so wonderful.  People come in all the time saying that they received notification of their birthday reward or the notification that we haven't seen them in a while coupon.  love it! 

[South28boutique]

OH, which scanning device do you all plan to incorporate?

[BofBArtStudio]

How do you have it automatically add the loyalty discount?  We still have to press the three dots on the upper right to see if the customer has any rewards after we add the customer to the transaction.  

Our process is to add the customer to every transaction, then press the three dots in the upper right, click redeem rewards, and then see if they have a reward and click redeem.  But if it would automatically pop up when a customer has a reward, that would make things so much better.

[Twiggy]

Square

automations.

In all honesty 2024 looks like it will be the worst year for retail f2f sales since 2008 - floristry is a good forecaster of how things will go, as our shelf life is 5 days and we are a super luxury - however business to business and regular clients is looking good - most of these clients are in corporate law or people with spare income for luxury goods, services or product. Many of the Square automations were initiated during lockdown in 2020, QR codes , self ordering and these were fantastic and suited the  Covid retail/ environment.  The order manager is great for internet orders  - keeping the customer up to date about the process of their order but it makes the sale either by phone or F2F take much longer than it used to with delivery addresses / modifiers and doesn’t keep them [non internet orders} updated about the process of their order and many of our products are in Latin - spell check hates Latin and international names, especially surnames!  

I do love the ability to make an estimate into an invoice automatically but again we are finding people are saying “I’ve got £4000 pounds for my wedding what can you do for that - so inventory is not used - rather than itemised billing like we did circa 2000 - people might cherry pick - we look at the job as a whole and adapt the cost with a fixed cost of goods / labour / logistics included in the overall price rather than “ Product + Tax + Labour + delivery “ and in the USA tip””

I also love the sell as pre order and scheduled products for online items and banners etc promo - emails for signing up.  Sadly I can’t use marketing - MAN I HAVE TRIED! But as my clients haven’t clicked the “receive marketing GDPR” I can’t message /email with square marketing.

That aside automations for reports and sales trends is very useful 

[maxpete]

Glad to hear that you have found some use out of the automations, even with running into some frustrating issues too!

[Doran]

This biggest automation benefit for me would be loyalty and appointments.  The ability for customers to build an account and look up their skincare purchases to reorder instead of calling me and waiting for me to find their chart when they can't remember.  Plus, just not losing business by not being next to the phone all day booking appointments.  I can't really be in both the treatment room and the reception desk so online booking and the Square go app improve my business daily.  

[maxpete]

A very great use case of how automation can help you focus on what you need to without being in a bunch of places at once!

[Candlestore]

My BIGGEST automations have come in the form of exporting from Square and my Online Sales.  Then I use Excels Power Query to take this data and formate it to a CSV file that is usable for other Programs.

For 2 major examples:

1) QuickBooks Desktop - Square and QuickBooks does not have a Good integration that makes everything work.  I download Transactions Items and Transactions Details csv from Square.  Use power query to make a csv file that Merges and Manipulates the data a little.  Then use a program that uploads this newly formatted data to Quickbooks.  So every transaction in Square is now Uploaded to Quickbooks with Transaction and Deposit IDs and the Sales Tax Square uses, to avoid Rounding errors between Square and QuickBooks.   The old way took 2 hours trying to repeat what I did the previous day to upload my sales data to QuickBooks, Now this takes me 10 min for a week of sales data to be imported to QuickBooks.

2) Inventory - This one I got help from @TheRealChipA,  He formatted my power query to merge my inventory from QBs, my Online Store, and Square.... to create a master invenrtory list to keep all my inventory counts correct.   Now each night I can download these 3 inventory sheets, merge them then upload them back to the correct catalogs.   I try to keep my QBs Counts correct and then deduct sales from Square and my Online Store from the QBs Catalog.  But my Online Store and Square do not talk or have an integration.  So here again went from hours trying to get the quantities to work, to just another 10 minutes or so.  The longest parts on the operation are usually waitng for the files to download from the respected sources.

Currently I am working on an Inventory counting Spreadsheet for my Chromebooks using Google Sheets.  I have it that I scan a Barcode of the Item, Scan a 2D shelf Tag, then enter the quantity on that shelf.   This works great for what is on display.  The part I am woking on is my Inventory locations where I may have 2 cases of X, 3 Boxes of X, and 6 of the items that were in the case.  I have it that I can scan the Barcode, which looks in my Square Catalog for the Token in Square, Item Name, and a quantity that Square is currently reporting.  If the SKU is NOT in Square, Google Sheets Highlights the Item in RED.  My problem currently is if Item X is in say 3 storage (Overflow Locations).  Like our Tapers which or on Display qty 36, Quick Access Packs of a dozen 11 Packs (Basement), and then by the cases 2 full cases out in our back Barn.  Trying to figure out how to use Excel or Sheets to keep track of inventory in these different areas.  I can get a total inventory and show my Quick Pick and sales floor totals, but then I loose it with the Overflow in the Larger Bulk quantities.  Been digging into Inventory Control systems and some are just way over priced for my little store.  Would love if Square had this in for a Location of Overflow inventory.

[maxpete]

Love that you collaborated with @TheRealChipA on this too!

[TheRealChipA]

About a year ago, I started using an app called Cut+Dry to help automated my regular supply purchases from various vendors.  It’s a pretty ingenious app that will submit orders to vendors via email OR if my vendor has an ordering website it will actually automate the ordering process by pretending to be Chip-at-a-keyboard.  The great thing about it is that I can use the app to create running draft lists until I’m ready to submit it for processing.  No more having lists that I then have to manually enter into order forms.  It’s pretty magical and getting better all the time.  Best of all it’s free for restaurants to use.  Cut+Dry gets their money by providing white label ordering apps to the big vendors who can afford to pay for such things!

Otherwise, I’m an Apple fanboy.  I have an iPad and iPhone that handoff to each other so that I can run my business completely using one or both of those.  Pen and paper are pretty much obsolete for me except for when I’m brainstorming new concepts or ideas.  Even then, I’m finding Freeform (with an Apple Pencil)n to be an amazing aid to completely wean me off of paper.  I’m a spreadsheet addict.  I use them for everything, even for analyzing and aiding me in my bill paying process.

All of my budgeting and season financial planning are automated (yep, spreadsheets!).  I feed them my financials from the previous year, along with my goals for the new season and voila!  I haven’t had to manually worry about budgeting in years.

Otherwise, I’m firmly embedded in the Square Ecosystem — Team/Shifts, Payroll, Loyalty, Marketing, Online, Savings (which I use for budget control purposes) for now.  I do love the fact that most everything talks to most everything and I don’t have to worry about connecting all of the dots.  Of course, I have backups for all of that because, as we are all painfully aware, sometimes system-wide outages happen!

[maxpete]

Sounds like you have a pretty great system set in place!