Adding Merchandise functionality

Jessie Small

Hello! My museum has been using Altru for a few years now for membership, general ticket sales, group sales and online ticketing. We are thinking about switching our store over to using Altru for Merchandise sales.

What can you tell us about your experience with Altru Merchandise Functions. Tips to know ahead of time? Things you liked/ Things that were more difficult? We aren't a large store. We prob have 4,000+ SKU's and do about $250,000+ in sales annually.

Thanks in advance!!

Dianne Crosby

@Jessie Small

Hi Jessie,

We've used Altru for ticketing, membership, and merchandise since 2014. The benefit of having our cashiers on the same POS system is why we've stayed with it for so long. Overall, I would say that the merchandise feature in Altru is generally pretty good from the cashier's point of view. But it is very challenging for the store manager.

Managers for larger stores who are accustomed to a feature-rich POS system will be extremely frustrated with Altru. But smaller stores that don't demand too much from their system can make it work.

I've had to create a bunch of workarounds to make up for the lack of features compared to other retail point-of-sale systems. But, at the end of the day, I've been able to make it work all these years.

I'd say the biggest challenge is the lack of useful sales reports. Most everything you do will be using Query, exporting it to Excel, and manipulating the data in Excel to get the report you need. This issue is made even more challenging due to the reports I need require data from two types of queries. So I'm actually exporting two queries to Excel and merging those two spreadsheets together.

There isn't a way to report on the items you have on order. This was less of an issue for us in the past when we were smaller, but has become more challenging as we grow.

The next challenge is printing merchandise labels. Altru can only print 1" x 2" rectangle labels - which is too large the majority of our merchandise. We have a 3rd party software (NiceLabel Pro) that we use instead.

There is no defined process for performing annual physical inventory counts. I've had to use trial and error to figure out a process for this.

I'm happy to answer more questions if you need, just let me know. If helpful, I'm also willing to schedule a zoom meeting and share my screen to show you the issues we encounter.

Best,

Dianne

Alex Weldon

@Jessie Small
Hey Jessie!

I run a gift shop a bit smaller than yours and have found that on the backend Altru works but is frustrating whereas it's great for our cashiers. Once all of the merch is entered, upkeep isn't terrible. We manually enter any term our cashiers might search for in the skus when adding a new item, then use a Bluetooth barcode scanner to scan in the upc which is tedious. Once an item is in though, it's very easy to adjust inventory, pricing, etc.

Altru doesn't really print useful barcodes, so we got a Phomemo M120 from Amazon that can print barcodes along with the name of the product and price (or anything else, the template is completely customizable), and I definitely recommend something like this to keep things consistent, especially if you have to generate any of your own barcodes.

Like previously mentioned, reports are a pain point. I've created 4 ad-hoc queries though which allow me to pull all the numbers and info needed. My most used pulls merchandise activity by cashier, so I can see if we are selling or losing more merchandise depending on the cashier and easily see if there was an error in a sale.

Overall, altru is usable for a small shop and better than nothing but is definitely hard to grow with. My email is Aweldon@discoverycenter.org if you have any other questions!

Jessie Small

@Dianne Crosby

Thank you for all the helpful info! I am curious about the batch process. If you have items from an order that don't all arrive at the same time - how does Altru handle getting these into inventory and still showing that some items from the order have yet to arrive?

also- do you sell/use gift cards? Can you change sales tax in a specific order? Sometimes we have schools that purchase souvenir bags and use their tax exempt. Would I have to set these up as 2 different items or can I select no tax at the transaction.

Thanks!!!

Dianne Crosby

@Jessie Small

Batches

When committing a batch, you will only include the items on the order that you did receive. You'll create another batch for the items on backorder and leave it as uncommitted until you receive those items.

You can open that uncommitted batch to see what items are still on order. However, you can't report/query on items in uncommitted batches. So that can get frustrating.

Gift Cards

We use a third party for gift cards. We currently use eCard Systems on an iPad:

When selling/redeeming gift cards, we process the transaction in both Altru and eCards. We've used eCards for years and it's been okay. But I am planning to research if there is a better option for us when I have time.

Sales Tax

You can create multiple tax rates in Altru. When you create a new merchandise item you select which tax rate to apply to that item. (For example, in Utah the tax rate for food items is 3%, and on non-food items is 7.75%)

For tax-exempt purchases, in Daily Sales there is a “Remove” button next to the tax rate. So the cashier simply clicks that button on tax-exempt orders.

Let me know if you have any more questions!

Dianne

Jessie Small

@Dianne Crosby Do you use a 3rd party for Gift Cards because Altru won't let you do them?

Dianne Crosby

@Jessie Small

Altru does not have any gift card functionality.

We've created merchandise items in Altru called “Gift Card” for various amounts. When we load a gift card in eCard Systems, we sell a merchandise item in Altru for that amount to track the income.

We've also created a custom payment type in Altru called “Gift Card”. When we redeem a gift card in eCard Systems, we use the gift card payment type in Altru to track how items in Altru were paid for.

Melissa Howard

@Jessie Small I work for an auto museum in Naples, FL and we have been using Altru for our POS sales. Did you decide to go with Altru? We are considering buying a different POS program that will allow us to merge our online store into our Altru system automatically. Currently we have to enter our online sales into Altru manually to have our records in one place. If you have gone with a different system, will you let me know how you like using it for your museum?

Beth Brau

@Jessie Small
Hi Jessie,

We onboarded Altru last February and although great for the cross communication of memberships and ticketing it's value as a merchandise POS is lacking. There are some work arounds we have created to allow for some flexibility but it can be tedious. Stacking discounts, Discounted items when you have dimensions, Gift Cards, communication with online store. It will also be important to learn how to build your own queries as there are limited built in queries. Once you learn how to build a query you can make quite a few different types to help with reporting. I created one for low inventory that I will run. Everything has goods and bads and you will probably discover some things you really like about it too.