What does it mean to say "the store is automated"? What can be considered a success in automation? And why is purchasing software just the ticket to achieving success?
20+ Signs of Successful Automation
Proper Accounting in the Store
✔️ All Products are Barcoded
Without barcodes on products:
actual purchase and sale prices are unknown,
items are sold based on price tags — stickers on the product, without verifying accuracy,
queues form at the checkout while the salesperson searches for the product in the system manually or records sales in a notebook.
Successful automation is when the salesperson doesn’t spend half an hour searching for an item in the system while there’s a line waiting and doesn’t scan items arbitrarily.
✔️ Inventory with an Open Store
Counting inventory without accounting software and without closing the store for at least a day is impossible. To assess the scale of loss due to a closed store for inventory, just observe for an hour and count how many people couldn’t enter the store and make purchases.
In a store with an accounting system, you can take inventory without closing to customers.
✔️ Rapid Scaling
With manual management, a business is quite inflexible: to upload products on prom.ua, one must spend a week entering items manually, verifying prices, and availability. To open a new store, one would need to clone themselves, add another 24 hours to the day and still not lose manual control over the current retail outlet. Manual management ≠ scaling.
An accounting program with up-to-date products, prices, and inventory allows for quick exporting of goods to an online store or marketplaces. Those opening a new retail outlet simply move items to the new store and can immediately start selling.
✔️ Work with Up-to-Date Information
Planning and strategy without accurate data resemble fortune-telling. Remember, something sold well last year, but is it worth betting on that product now? At what price and from whom was it purchased last year? What influenced the sales? Were there promotions?
Another extreme is stock control. One can visually assess how stocked the display is. But what’s in the warehouse, and in what quantity? Has the product been displayed in the sales area? Or are there similar items to sell off, so there’s no need to reorder from suppliers yet?
Knowing how much and what stock is in the warehouse, the amount, how many items are stagnant, and which assortment is ending — allows for flexible purchasing, avoiding excess or lack of in-demand products at retail points.
✔️ Control of Product Delivery
Delivery issues are quite common for sellers: they forgot to ship, missed deadlines, sent to the wrong branch, failed to control payments on delivery, or didn’t tie payments to sales. This results in apologies, follow-up calls, and double-checking.
In an accounting system, the workflow for shipments is simple: an order is received or automatically loaded from the online store → payment is attached or marked as cash on delivery → print a packing slip and generate the waybill directly in Torgsoft → the product is shipped, and its delivery is tracked. If needed, a thank-you SMS is sent for the order, and bonuses are credited to the client, encouraging them to return to your store.
✔️ Efficient Use of Retail Space
Practically every business has seasonal products. If all goods are in customer view, sales efficiency drops — customers will see clutter, making it hard to find the needed product. Off-season items should be stored in the warehouse. But how to control what, where, and in what quantity has been moved?
Store floor space is cleared by timely moving seasonal products for temporary storage. The program controls what is placed in each box and where it is stored in the warehouse.
✔️ Electronic Accounting of Settlements with Suppliers
Paper invoices from suppliers are common. But they aren’t handwritten, are they?
Electronic exchange of invoices with suppliers in the form of Excel files or electronic catalog allows accounting for dozens of items from suppliers into the system within 5 minutes. The seller or administrator records the fact of funds given to the supplier in the accounting program, avoiding misunderstandings in settlements.
The Benefits of Automation for Customers
✔️ No Waiting Lines
The pandemic has taught us all to keep at least a 1.5-meter social distance. However, few people actually follow this distance, and in lines, there’s often an invisible battle among customers over who’s next. This can make visitors break the distance, causing discomfort for others.
Shoppers prefer stores where there are no waiting lines, where service is fast and accurate, where items are labeled, and the seller doesn’t record sales in a notebook. Where there are no disputes about prices, and customers can clearly see their purchase details, prices, and discounts on a customer display screen.
✔️ No Reason for Criticism
It’s hard to imagine a business with a perfect reputation. Even extremely successful projects like Rozetka have a Google rating of 4 out of 5. But reviews don’t determine the success of a business; systems do.
Automation helps avoid criticism due to forgotten or unshipped items, out-of-stock products that appear available on the website, mismatches between the price tag and checkout, or service speed issues.
✔️ Feedback
When placing an order, customers expect to receive feedback. Competition has accustomed consumers to getting feedback within a few hours (or better, minutes).
The cycle of successful communication with the client:
Following agreements — the manager calls the client back at the scheduled time because the program sends a reminder.
Documenting all client interactions to avoid repeatedly confirming order details.
Sending status messages about payments, shipping, delivery, promotions, discounts, and loyalty points.
✔️ Loyalty Program
Even if the store is located in a resort area or on a major route, where you might think there are no regular customers, a loyalty program is essential. People habitually return to stores where they were well-treated. A vivid example is a favorite café in a tourist town, a go-to hotel, or a particular seller at the market because “you can only get homemade products there.”
Even random customers can leave a positive review on Google and earn you a coveted “5-star” rating.
Often, the success lies not in the uniqueness of the product but in its presentation — from good customer service, punctuality, and high-quality service to dozens of loyalty types, including discounts, gift cards, and bonuses.
Even if the average check is small, bonuses motivate customers to return for another “unexpected” purchase.
Accounting Tools for Employees
✔️ Real-Time Stock Availability
Sales associates gain many grey hairs when a product is already “checked out” and paid for, only to find it is out of stock. In the customer’s eyes, the salesperson is at fault. The situation worsens with a queue of “sighing” customers. The seller frantically looks for the item, fails to find it, and tries to resolve the situation with refunds, exchanges, and apologies.
Real-time stock availability is maintained through regular inventories, sales control, and daily cash checks.
✔️ Motivating Sales Staff for Results
The indifference of sales staff directly affects the store’s reputation: people tend to avoid outlets where they felt they were only grudgingly helped. The salesperson also influences the store’s appearance — from product layout to interior orderliness.
With automated accounting, motivation can be flexible — setting incentives for different product groups, individual or team performance. A team dedicated to the store’s success attracts more customers.
✔️ Employee Control
An uncontrolled business can eventually collapse — frequent resignations, conflicts, gossip, lateness, and sick leaves.
In reality, employees want a system: they like being told what and how to do, being monitored, and kept from temptation. People prefer to play by the rules when they’re clear.
Point control is a sign of successful automation. Employees don’t come late, break discipline, or steal (rarely), knowing they’re being monitored and actions recorded. Control should be spontaneous and unpredictable, not through interrogations but through analysis of system data.
✔️ Minimizing Pointless, Routine Tasks
Employees aren’t idle — they’re delegated all necessary tasks to maintain the store. However, some work is outright routine, taking up time without any forward momentum. For example, bright-green price tags written in marker, which look outdated. How much time goes into filling and pasting them?
The accounting program generates barcodes and sends price tags to a label printer. A neatly presented label provides exhaustive product information. Labels can include legally required information — at minimum, the product name, price, barcode. Labels can also have logos, composition, size range, expiration dates, and other features.
Principles and Tools of Automation for the Manager
✔️ The Owner is Not Part of Daily Operations but Oversees from the Top
The term “delegation” (the transfer of duties and responsibilities to subordinates) appears in every management book. But many managers struggle to give up daily store tasks, thinking that is their main role. Some stay up until midnight with paperwork, inventory, and purchase orders. This isn’t good or bad — it’s a fact that significantly hinders development for both the manager and the business.
Those who automate are ready to delegate. Employees can be given limited access to only the information they need, restricted from deleting documents, and required by regulations to complete tasks on time.
The business owner’s job is to monitor and offer advice when necessary. Torgsoft has dozens of metrics — reports and analyses for managers that help them avoid routine tasks.
✔️ A Comprehensive View of the Business
One horror scenario is when there’s no money. Cash shortages often happen when an entrepreneur doesn’t distinguish between gross income and profit and has no understanding of how much can be invested in goods without incurring debt to employees, landlords, suppliers, and other contractors.
Entrepreneurs don’t need to be accountants to manage finances. They just need to see the cost of remaining stock, profit over time, and current expenses. The accounting system provides real-time information for management decisions at the press of a button.
✔️ Preventing Unusual Situations
Managers feel disheartened when someone tries to deceive, cheat, or steal from them again. On one hand, business is built on trust between manager and subordinates; on the other hand, there’s the familiar phrase “trust, but verify.”
No better way has been devised to prevent resignation than control and motivation. The tools for detecting fraud and controlling employees in the accounting system include role restrictions, user action logs, document and setting change logs, product movement, and financial document control.
✔️ Point Control Tools
For managers, ignorance and predictability are harmful. If employees know that every Monday is a staff meeting, and the first Friday of each month is inventory, they can manipulate information for the manager.
With the tools above, a manager can appear on the sales floor at the most unexpected times and conduct point checks on specific items that raise suspicion. This keeps salespeople alert, fostering a sense of order and readiness.
✔️ Staff Safety: No One is Irreplaceable
Employee turnover is a loss for any business. The loss is heightened when the employee knows too much and wants to leave quickly — few are willing to wait two weeks and invest in training a new person.
Different scenarios: information is stored in an employee’s head vs. systematically organized in the accounting program.
When the business is automated, the departing employee only takes their experience and skills. Information about suppliers, clients, and contact history, deals, and sales remain in the system. The result: no one is irreplaceable because everything is in the system.
✔️ All Answers are in the Program
Without a program, it’s extremely difficult to gather overall business information: the client conversation status — search the messenger, salesperson is sick — check Viber, payment for goods — in Privat24, an order — in the store admin or on “Prom”, today’s sales — in the seller’s notebook, debt records — in the “VIP” client notebook, supplier deliveries — in an A4 invoice, inventory results — in the reconciliation act, changes in purchase prices — in the revaluation plan. Now combine all this.
Successful automation is when all store operation answers are collected in one accounting system.
✔️ Remote Business Management
The cause of entrepreneurial anxiety is a sense of lost control. Businesses aren’t created to work 8 AM to 9 PM in-store, glued to every process, nor to become enslaved by their own initiative. Some entrepreneurs dread taking a family vacation for two weeks, fearing a mental image of the store being dismantled brick by brick.
How does automation change this and help reduce anxiety? The business owner can connect to the accounting system and monitor:
cash in registers,
where funds were spent,
product movements,
any returns, damages, write-offs,
staff work hours, store opening, shift closure, and departure,
who handled supplier transactions and the amounts,
who took any credit.
Additionally, the manager can assign tasks individually or to all employees at once and confirm that a colleague read the instructions, meaning they can’t ignore it.
No matter how far an entrepreneur travels, they remain connected to the store.
✔️ Applying Knowledge from Other Entrepreneurs
Automation isn’t as daunting as it seems. Often, obstacles to automation are easily solved. In our experience, business owners tend to describe problems with lengthy explanations, thinking their situation is unique. We understand what’s needed from the first few words and already have a solution.
There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Solutions already exist in available tools. Torgsoft has accumulated experience from entrepreneurs since every mode was created based on customer requests.
Those who automate benefit from accumulated knowledge in the program and the help of automation experts to solve tasks efficiently and move forward.
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