Merchant Wisdom

For Mac merchants who wish to manage their business rather than the computer. Merchant Wisdom is the Point Of Sales (POS) system that combines ease of use with operations management and tools to understand your customers. Requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later.

Grow your relationship with your customers, not your computer.

Merchant Wisdom is your sales clerk, customer satisfaction rep, inventory specialist, book-keeper, and more. Expand the ways you make it easier for shoppers to purchase from you: credit cards, discounts, gift cards, store credit, and more. Merchant Wisdom makes it easier for customers to buy from you, giving them more incentive to do so repeatedly.

Combining years of commercial knowledge with the power of OS X we have produced this incredibly flexible Point of Sale system that will fit right into your workflow. Following Apple’s Human Interface Guidelines very closely, we have produced a Point of Sale that is native to OS X that any experienced use will feel right at home with.

Merchant Wisdom is designed with an efficient keyboard workflow intended to make creating and processing invoices as efficient as possible. But don’t take our word for it. Download Merchant Wisdom and give the invoice processing workflow a try. We are confident you will agree that it is faster to check out a sale with Merchant Wisdom than with any other Point of Sale system available.

The primary function of Merchant Wisdom, or any Point of Sale system — taking orders, is designed with the efficient cashier in mind. The entire workflow of creating an invoice can be run completely through the keyboard allowing your touch typists maximum efficiency while processing customer orders. No longer will your customers have to wait in long lines while your cashiers search through menus of commands or multiple panels looking for the item they need. This also removes the unnecessary cost of a touch-screen monitor.

Invoice Processing

The primary function of any point of sale system is invoice processing. By designing the invoice processing workflow to be completely keyboard driven Merchant Wisdom offers the most efficient system available. Display and processing multiple invoices at the same time, allowing your sales staff to handle more than one order simultaneously. Or save an order and return to it at a later time.

Purchase Order Creation/Tracking

By linking the handling of purchase orders directly with sales and inventory management Merchant Wisdom drastically reduces the amount of bookkeeping required to keep inventory up to date. By executing an inventory report it is possible to know exactly what items are low or out of stock and which vendors supply those items allowing for easy ordering of additional stock. When an order arrives it is easy to check the manifest against Merchant Wisdom and process the order directly into inventory. Merchant Wisdom also allows for the partial processing of a purchase order to avoid the necessity of forcing your suppliers to hold an order until everything is available.

Vendor Management

Merchant Wisdom integrates vendor management directly into the overall point of sale system allowing for you to keep track of which vendor supplies which item and at what cost. With vendor management tightly integrated it allows for the creation of a purchase order based on which vendor supplies the item at the best price. Merchant Wisdom also shows your retail mark up and profit per vendor.

Employee Management [Standard Edition]

Merchant Wisdom allows for the tracking of employee hours directly at the terminal making it easy for your employees to clock in and out each day and removes an additional piece of costly equipment. Each employee can also pull up their time card directly at the terminal and know exactly how many hours they have worked each day. In addition, it is possible to pull a summary report for a selected time period or for a specific employee for payroll purposes. It is also possible to key a drawer to a specific employee.

Store Credit [Standard Edition]

In-store credit is generally more of a headache for the business owner than it is worth. However Merchant Wisdom makes managing customer store credit extremely easy. Credit bills can be run as often as the store owner chooses and it is very easy to grant a customer store credit and set their spending limit. Interest rates and penalty fees are all configurable making overall management very straightforward. It is not even necessary to issue a customer a membership card as their records can be referenced via their name, phone number, address or customer identification number.

Layaway [Standard Edition]

Monitoring customer layaway purchases is extremely easy with Merchant Wisdom. Similar in design to store credit, your customers can make a purchase on layaway and come in whenever you choose to make payments against that item on layaway. Each layaway is treated like an extended invoice that tracks their entire payment history. It is even possible to add or remove items from layaway at any time prior to the completion of the layaway.

Drawer Activity [Standard Edition]

Each Merchant Wisdom terminal can have a single active cash drawer which can be tied to a specific employee. When a drawer is started the starting cash is entered and from that point until the drawer is closed every transaction on that terminal is linked to that drawer. When the drawer is closed a complete summary is available for printing which includes a balance sheet for comparing the actual cash in the drawer to what should be there — making drawer cash out simple and easy.

Gift Cards [Standard Edition]

Being able to track gift cards can be an administrative nightmare. Merchant Wisdom attempts to alleviate some of this issue by tracking the entire card internally. To issue a gift card it is purchased like a normal item and processed on sale. Once that sale is complete the card becomes active and stays active until it is either depleted or until it expires. The expiration of a gift card is configured by you and is set in months. Any form of gift card that has a unique identifier can be used — giving you the widest range of options for purchasing gift cards for your business.

Credit Card Processing [Standard Edition]

Currently, Merchant Wisdom is configured to work with PayPal for credit card processing. PayPal is one of the most recognized clearing houses in existence. This will require a separate account to be created and then following their steps for connectivity. Once that is completed all credit card processing is routed through them. Note that an internet connection is required for credit card processing.

External Credit Card Processing

If you have an external device for processing credit cards, you can still record the approval code inside of Merchant Wisdom and have that approval code associated with the invoice. Merchant Wisdom can then report on that approval code to help you keep all transactions.

Activity Reports

Merchant Wisdom has a wide range of reports available to monitor the health of your business. Daily, weekly and monthly inventory activity reports are available as well as inventory loss reports and employee hours reports. As our customers request it, additional reports will be made available at no cost. If there is a report you need, merely email our helpful support staff and we will do our best to add it to the next maintenance release of Merchant Wisdom.

Inventory Management

To insure that an accurate count of inventory is available in Merchant Wisdom it is possible to start an inventory audit which allows you to adjust the inventory levels inside of Merchant Wisdom. Each inventory audit can be tracked via the employee who instituted the audit and who closed the audit. Once an audit is completed the inventory levels will be adjusted automatically insuring that you know exactly what is in stock at all times.

Discount Management

Discounts and price changes are some of the major reasons that errors occur during the check-out process. By entering your discounts into Merchant Wisdom they can be handled automatically during check-out and are printed clearly on the receipt that the customer receives. In addition, discounts can be scheduled in advance and will not go into effect until the prescribed date and will automatically discontinue based on the dates you enter when you create or update the discount.

Credit Card Transaction Caching [Standard Edition]

Merchant Wisdom is capable of caching credit card transactions to allow you to accept credit cards even without an internet connection. Then at a later date when you have connectivity you can process all of the pending charges at once. These cached transactions will then be purged from the system to avoid unnecessarily storing private customer information. While these transactions are cached, they will be encrypted in Merchant Wisdom’ database.

Item Rental [Standard Edition]

Do you rent mailboxes? Furniture? Merchant Wisdom can keep track of all of your rentals including their rates, due dates and who rented them. You can even offer renewal discounts automatically. With Merchant Wisdom you can have as many rental rates for an item as you wish and the best rate will automatically be selected for you based on the rental period.

.mac Backup Integration

The first time that you run Merchant Wisdom it will automatically add its data files as a QuickPick item in Apple’s Backup software. After that you can add Merchant Wisdom to your normally scheduled backups without having to worry about where you stored the data files on your system.
Edition Feature Comparison
Presence Abundance
Drawer Monitoring NO YES
Credit Card Processing NO YES
Inventory Management YES YES
Vendor Management YES YES
Employee Management NO YES
Order Processing YES YES
Purchase Order Processing YES YES
Store Credit NO YES
Layaway Tracking NO YES
Gift Cards NO YES
Activity Reports YES YES
Discount Management YES YES
Credit Card Transaction Caching NO YES
Item Rentals NO YES
.mac Backup Integration YES YES

User-powered software

We deeply trust your instincts and opinions, and so we maintain a user-powered software development process. We invite you, as a user of Merchant Wisdom, to directly participate in its development process, by requesting features, reading other people’s requests, and voting on them so we can prioritize our time. We love this feedback; come and join the community, and make Merchant Wisdom even better.