Builders’ merchant software reviewed

Integrity Trader provides software solutions to several different retail sectors, including builders’ merchants and hardware stores. In many entries in our blog, we’ve talked at great length about the benefits of software for builders’ merchants of all sizes, not to mention the content across our website. You’re probably slightly bored of us telling you how fantastic our software is, so now we’re sharing what our customers make of our software instead. As we’ve mentioned, we have customers in many different sectors, so if you’re running a hardware store or country store, head over to our case studies page to learn more. In this article, we’ll be focusing on builders’ merchants software, so read on for some first-hand reviews…

Point-of-sale plusses

One of the key features of Trader software is its point-of-sale functionality. Instead of having to use paper-based processes, calculators or awkward generic software, Trader is built specifically for merchants like yours. Patrick Rogers Topline reported a far more user-friendly interface than they encountered in other software packages. Many users comment on the value of automatically storing transaction information for each purchase. Crinkill Merchants’ John Hassett spoke of the improvements: ‘on the point-of-sale side, we feel getting information on cashier sales and searching for documents have improved which saves a considerable amount of time during day-to-day activities.’

Taj Sanghera of Thames Building Supplies was also pleased with his new point-of-sale system, which certainly was a step up from his previous one. ‘Before running Trader we were using a combination of paper-based order books and spreadsheets to record sales.’ Sanghera continued: ‘we now benefit from a fast, user-friendly point-of-sale system which provides us with valuable day-to-day reports.’

Mark Joliffe, Business Manager of the Cornish Lime Company, concurs with this assessment. ‘Visibility of cost prices at point-of-sale and consistent contract pricing helps to ensure that we sell at the best margins possible. I use the profitability reports to monitor how we’re doing on a daily basis.’

Stock control

Another of our customers’ favourite features is undoubtedly the improved stock control functionality that Trader software provides. Crinkill Merchants praised this aspect of the software in particular: ‘the labelling system and wireless handheld scanning functionality is working well for us, supporting our cycle counting processes. We rely heavily on the labelling of every product and carry out regular cycle counts on a daily basis to manage our stock levels across two sites.’

The Cornish Lime Company also found this functionality valuable. ‘Stock control is infinitely better too, since we can see exactly what we’ve got on the shelves and what needs to be re-ordered.’ The company had previously had problems with products going out of stock – no longer a problem thanks to the implementation of Trader.

These reviews are just snippets of our full case studies, but from these short quotes you can see that Trader’s builders’ merchant software has the potential to drastically improve the day-to-day running of your business. Contact us if you think your business could benefit from implementing new software.