A new business insights dashboard in newsagency software offers newsagents a bright pathway

The Tower Systems newsagency software has benefited from a major update this week. While the company releases 3 or 4 updates a year, this update is special because of the new business insights platform it delivers.

There is nothing like it in any other newsagency software.

This dashboard pushed business insights, it collects, curates and presents the insights data without being asked to do so.

Whereas plenty of software programs offer reporting facilities for discovering insights, it’s a pull approach. This dashboard is a push, and it focusses on key measurement points that are vitally valuable to local small business retailers, especially retail newsagents.

This new dashboard focuses on 6 critical areas of retail to assist you on making key decisions by representing data in a graphical & easy to understand format.

These 6 metrics are among the most important metrics that Retailer should be focusing on to impact the profitability of their businesses.

1. Where Are We Today – Gives you a snapshot of the overall sales & liabilities as it stands Today, this powerful tool can also be expanded to a desired time period.
2. What’s Not Selling – This gives you a visual understanding of what is not performing in your business.  Deadstock in any business is lost cash.  This report gives you the ability to make decisions on this underperforming stock whether it be discounting or other stock reductions strategies to unlock this lost cash.
3. What Am I Missing Out on – This give you a list of items that have sold out and potential missed opportunity. The visual sales history will assist in ensuring the right items are restocked to ensure future revenue is not missed out on.
4. What Sells With What – This gives you an insight to consumer basket analysis. Through this you will see exactly what stock items sell with other stock items and from this you will be able to leverage upsell opportunities, co-location and promotion opportunities.   This also shows the sold alone percentage so you can see item upsell efficiency.
5. Is Theft An Issue – This provides a in-depth visual overview of all the retailer audit log records by reason, number of occurrences by time day. This will assist in identifying staff theft/training issues that may need to be addressed within the business.
6. When Are We Busiest & Quietest –   This is a visual overview detect any quiet or peak times in your business by displaying over the week as well as detailed by hour

The idea of the dashboard was mine. While the Tower newsagency software offers the insights, newsagents needed to know they wanted them, they had to look. Too many did not – for a range of reasons. Hence, the decision to create a push approach. I brought the idea to the tech team and, at the same time, tested the idea with some customers. Soon enough, we were invested.

Built from scratch by the Tower software development team, this is a significant investment of a genuine value-add for small business retailers, like retail newsagents.

Once the new dashboard was created, we showed customers in a Zoom meeting, and then we live-tested it in my own newsagency shops. Wow! The value was immediate. I saw things that I did not realise, opportunities there for the embracing. The visual ways the insights are presented are terrific, accessible.

We then offered it to the close-knit Tower Systems beta community – a community of retailers from different channels who get top test an early release of the software. Their feedback was wow, this is amazing!

Now, this week, it is available for all Tower Systems customers.

The enhancement is available to all Tower Systems customers as part of the regular update enhancement service from the company. The company is also providing complete documentation as well as training.

The what am I missing out on tab has shocked some retailers. They did not realise that they were missing so much revenue by not being consistent with re-ordering. Some retailers choose to not reorder some lines as they want to see change in their shop. That’s a reasonable decision, unless it cost the business out of certain revenue.

The goal here is to underscore business decisions with accurate data. the easier we make that data available to local small business retailers line retail newsagents the greater the value they can derive from the POS software they use, and value today is critical in every area of our retail businesses.

If you’d like to hear more about some of the insights offered in the new insights dashboard, here’s a video from me speaking about it:

Yes, I get that there will be some grinding their gears at what may read as an ad. The thing is, there has not been much genuine innovation for retail newsagents in newsagency software in recent years. There has been some enhancements connecting with The Lott, integrations with BNPL, integrations with more EFTPOS platforms, but not much innovation around newsagency retail management.

This insights dashboard is something I am proud of because it is genuinely innovative, serves the retail newsagent and is available to newsagents for no additional cost. It’s a true value-add, and we don’t see enough of that these days.

Disclosure: I own Tower Systems and am proud that my company serves more than 1,700 newsagents with newsagency software. The company also serves another 1,500 or so retailers in other specialty retail channels. If you think you might be interested in the Tower software, please email sales@towersystems.com.au.