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Extra Features and Video Online FloristsReview.com R E A D O N L I N E 53 sector, point-of-sale means that I cannot sell something I do not have," he relates. "It's why flower retailers need to be able to tell customers immediately what they have in stock or inform them if a product is out of stock before they make the purchase." If you think this sounds ridiculous, think of it from an online shopping experience. Why allow a customer to go through the process of picking out a floral product he or she wants, only to have to inform him or her later that you are out of the specific item he or she selected? When this happens, your customer's satisfaction is gone, and he or she is unlikely to return for subsequent purchases. "A POS system should not only process your transactions but also be specific to what a florist has to do in a flower shop from a workflow perspective," Natarajan explains. Once a shop's inventory of a specific item is sold—regardless of whether it was sold via the website, telephone or walk in—the inventory should be automatically updated in the POS software as well as on the website. Typical florist-specific POS programs should include order management, customer tracking, customer communication, payment options, recipe storage, flower design tools and a delivery management system. e GotFlowers Florist POS System, for example, includes a recipe system that, once a design's flower count is input, enables designers to follow, to ensure that there are no cost overruns and that the design looks the same for every order. "By following a recipe, the customer always gets value for what he or she paid, and the floral retailer provides only what he or she is supposed to provide," Natarajan says. Tony Fiannaca Jr., third-generation co-owner of Sparks Florist, with two retail locations in Sparks and Reno, Nev., and a floral design and delivery center in Sparks, told me that his company uses the GotFlowers recipe system and thinks it's great. "It is a thorough and efficient way to make sure our cost-of-goods numbers are where they should be," he explains. "is system has the flexibility to view each recipe in terms of markup or margin and will explicitly charge for labor, if desired. "Each recipe can have a picture added to it for easy reference by the designer," Fiannaca continues. "We also add specific variety tables for each flower, which helps guide designers in using the correct products to make the recipe and makes creating a shopping list effortless." Before using this system, Fiannaca says that Sparks Florist encountered duplication by having to use its POS system and Excel worksheets, which needed constant attention. He adds that they seldom received system updates—something the cloud-based GotFlowers system does automatically. "With GotFlowers, we have streamlined the recipe process because we can keep all of our data in one system," Fiannaca elaborates. "e staff at GotFlowers are always open to addressing our concerns. As a result, we constantly work with GotFlowers to suggest and help create new features or update old features that make a real difference to our business."

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