Give Furniture Store Efficiency A Boost With Business Management Software

Furniture and other Home Goods stores that use Business Management Software benefit from increased operational efficiency and sales.

A furniture store is a dynamic work setting. To keep up with this fast-paced environment, many owners turn to ERP Software or Business Management Software to keep track of inventory movement, as well as manage all other areas of their Home Goods Business.

Young-man-shopping-furniture---46316900_XXXLarge-1200pxW_adc1e075-2 If you walk into a furniture showroom twice in one week, you’re not likely to see the same floor plan the second time. That’s because the product is constantly shifting, and managers are busy moving things around to promote sales and attract customer attention. Owners are also navigating the impact of a fluctuating supply chain.

This is just one area where Business Management Software or enterprise resource planning (ERP) software comes in handy. When you consider your commissioned sales staff, accounting requirements, and unique selling structures, it makes even more sense. Here are a few examples:

Managing Inventory

When you think about it, there’s a lot of inventory to keep track of in a furniture store:

Furniture
Mattresses
Audio
Home theatre
Appliances
Home décor

If you operate a furniture store with more than one outlet, be sure to read our post: Why Inventory Control Software Is a Must for Multiple Locations.

For everything you see on the showroom floor, there’s even more being stored either in "the back", at an off-site warehouse, or available for special order. To manage the flow of inventory, business management software typically has barcode and serial number scanning capabilities. This allows your shipping and receiving department to enter new items into the store database as they arrive, while your sales team automatically removes them when they make a sale.

Selling Features

Selling furniture is rarely a straightforward business. Your range of customers could be anything from people with insurance claims to someone who wants to outfit his theatre room with the latest home entertainment system. You also get customers who spot a good deal in your weekly flyer and decide it’s time to upgrade the bedroom set.

For more on the secret sauce of creating kits check out: How You Can Increase Your Average Basket Size

For the latter, ERP software lets you bundle individual inventory items into a kit (also known as a bill of materials). Let’s say the flyer deal included the following items:

Bed frame
Mattress
Boxspring
Bedding
Matching nightstands

By having these items readily available in a kit, you can sell the lot with a single keystroke and have the invoice reflect the grouped sale price. You can create the invoice to show each individual item in the kit, which is a handy feature for warranty tracking purposes.

Commissioned Sales

A motivated sales team can go a long way toward increasing sales. Furniture stores that use business management software are equipped to track who sells what so commissions are distributed correctly.

You can configure the software so that every time an invoice is created, a salesperson is attached to it. If more than one member helped with the sale you can create a split commission. That’s a fair way of handling the transaction if a customer shops one day, and then comes back later to complete the transaction with a different sales representative.

Read Easy-to-Calculate Commission Plans That Really Motivate for more on this.

Could your furniture store operations use a little streamlining? Windward System Five on Cloud Business management software features an integrated module specifically for furniture stores. Call us to learn how we can bring extra efficiency to your business.