In this application, the system provides a means of capturing the daily sales and takings for each branch office and presents them as online management weekly and monthly reports to head office staff.
Each branch consists of several departments, each with one or more tills and the business operates on multiple shifts. The sales figures are collected for a range of lines in each department, some of which change from time to time, such as for special promotions. The branch office manager is given the latitude to purchase certain items and to pay casual staff.
Each branch manager enters the sales figures for each line in each department for each shift and the total takings for each till. The manager is alerted to any variances found between the total sales and the total takings.
Any petty cash and casual staff payments also recorded on the system. The cash taken each day, less any local expenditures, is banked on a regular basis and these bankings are also recorded on the system.
The branch office manager is allowed to make changes to the entered data in order to reconcile the figures for each day. Once the branch manager is satisfied with the figures for the day, that day is closed and no further changes may be made to them without head office intervention.
Each manager is uniquely identified by their user name and password, all of the records are time and date stamped, and all changes are recorded, so that an audit trail may be maintained of every user transaction.
Being retail outlets, the sales are all recorded inclusive of VAT, so system automatically back calculates the net sales figures and the applies the correct nominal accounts to each sales line.
As the takings and the bankings are recorded on a daily basis, the cash flow in each branch office can be monitored very closely, and the system can immediately alert the managers to any inconsistencies.
The recorded figures are aggregated automatically for review on a weekly and monthly basis by head office. A range of management reports are automatically generated by the system to provide trend analyses, inter-branch comparisons and historical comparisons.
Every sales line, takings record and purchase entry on every daily sheet is recorded as an individual transaction in an audit trail. If an entry is changed, then a copy of the previous entry is retained and the current entry is updated.
As well as providing much tighter financial control over the branches, this application reduces the workload on both the branch staff and on the head office staff.
All of the users access the information via Internet Explorer browsers running their own PCs in the branch offices.