How Garden Centres Can Use an ERP to Improve Their Business
#1. Goods received in one unit of measure and sold in another
Garden centres sometimes take in goods in one unit of measure and sell them in another. An item might arrive as a "bundle", for example, but be sold by the metre or by the kilogram. What often happens in this situation is that the goods are booked in straight away in the unit they are sold in, which is certainly not the best approach, because it makes it harder to sell, say, half a bundle of something. A far better option is to use alternative units of measure — as TiramisuERP does — to define the unit the item is usually sold in, so that at any moment you can sell in either one.
#2. Adding product descriptions and photographs
One thing that can prove extremely useful is having descriptions and photographs for the items you sell. There will be times when a customer asks about a particular item and perhaps puts a question that a member of staff can answer far more easily with the product description and photograph in front of them. Beyond that, quotes sent to customers look considerably better when they carry product descriptions and images. In TiramisuERP you can enter a photograph and a description for every product, and you can also produce quotes, proforma invoices and invoices that include them — which makes the documents look more professional and conveys the value of what you are offering.
#3. Tracking expiry dates
Tracking expiry dates on items helps you keep stock well organised and makes sure the items closest to their date are always sold first. Many companies give up on expiry tracking because receiving goods this way strikes them as complicated, which it can be. It all depends on the software, of course. Recording expiry dates in TiramisuERP is fairly simple, and more importantly, when you produce outbound documents you can very quickly find the item with the nearest date and prepare it for dispatch.
#4. Recording subsidised payments
Given the kind of goods they sell, garden centres can find themselves in situations where a customer covers part or all of the amount through various subsidies. In cases like these it is important that everything is followed through properly in the business software so that the accounting is correct. In TiramisuERP subsidised payments are processed simply and the whole process is finished very quickly, so customers can take advantage of the subsidies available to them — and TiramisuERP users can win more customers as a result.
#5. Handling (simple) production
There are various situations in which simple production can be useful to a garden centre. Some of them are: putting together sets of different products sold at a better combined price, being able to sell a service alongside a product, or creating product sets where a given item is sold together with a tool that makes it easier to use (seed, soil and a planting tool).
#6. Organising deliveries to clients
Garden centres often run their own vehicles to deliver goods to clients. When the goods are being picked, the warehouse worker does not necessarily need to know how much to set aside for each individual client — far more often what matters to them is the total quantity to pick, after which the driver divides the goods between clients against the invoices at the point of handover. All of this can be handled very easily in TiramisuERP through the Deliveries function, which gives the warehouse worker a view of the total quantities to pack, and gives the driver, alongside the invoices they are carrying, a table showing what goes to each client. It can all be organised by vehicle and by town, so a complete delivery plan can be drawn up every day.
#7. Handling imports properly
When goods are imported, everything has to be followed through properly on two levels. The first is providing all the documentation needed for the import to be possible at all; the second is recording the import costs that determine the true purchase price of the items. Establishing the true purchase price on imported goods is very simple in TiramisuERP: you enter all the associated freight-forwarding and customs costs, which are then spread across every imported item and become part of its purchase price.