Tour: Peripherals and Modules

Peripherals

Peripherals provide services outside the business core.

It is easy to confuse all the bells-and-whistles of peripheral apps with the main functions of the business because peripherals tend to be the first things employees and customers see and the way they most often interact with the data.

They can be physical things like:

• POS devices,
• Barcode readers,
• Cashier drawers,

or they can be services like:

• GPS trackers,
• Optimized route maps,
• On-line web sales services, and
• Automatic email and mobile phone notifications.

A fun example of a peripheral is available from the MapQuest route planner. It can optimize routes by either time or distance, and it is free. Anyone can plan out a delivery route directly from MapQuest. Business apps can also incorporate MapQuest or other services like it into their software packages.

Software designers intentionally make it hard to tell what is integral and what is peripheral, because users don't need to know or want to know... the point is to make the experience as simple and seamless as possible for the users.

See for instance the discussion of laundry and dry-cleaning software in What about specialized niche purveyors? In the PressedPOS example, it appears the entire package including add-on modules is assembled entirely from peripheral apps. This common for many niche software providers. This does not mean that PressedPOS is not providing value for money because their customers probably have no way to assemble such a package on their own. PressedPOS provides a service by making all these useful peripherals available in a seamless, easy-to-use app.

Yet when all is finished, PressedPOS still does not provide most of the basic business core requirements at the center of Sumer.

Sumer is in beta version. Peripherals will be added bit by bit together with the means to incorporate them into the Sumer forms. Like everything else about Sumer, the purpose is to get the IT people out of the way and put the business directly into the hands of business managers.

Payment Processing and POS

Some POS providers obscure the fact that they are offering two separate services:

• Payment Processing accepts credit / debit card payments from customers and transfers them to the merchant's bank. See for instance the proMerchant website; they offer stand-alone Payment Processing and can provide free equipment "including terminals that are EMV and NFC-ready". 'EMV' means card readers where you slide or insert the card. 'NFC' is a terminal that also accepts tapping.
  
  The site CompareTech.co gives this explanation:
  
  

  How does Credit Card Processing work?

  
  

  Merchant banks, also known as acquiring banks, enter into agreements with merchants to set up accounts that enable them to accept credit card payments. These banks transfer the funds for credit card transactions into the merchants’ accounts and offer them a range of services such as credit card processing software, terminals and readers, customer service, promotional materials, and other processing services.

  To be able to accept credit card payments, a merchant must have a merchant processor account, which serves as an unsecured line of credit that pays the merchant for customer purchases. This payment is essentially a loan from the acquiring bank to the merchant’s account, covering the cost of the credit card transaction.

  However, when a credit card transaction is complete, the merchant receives an amount that is lower than the original transaction amount due to fees charged by the acquiring bank and the issuing bank. These fees include a percentage of the transaction amount, with the fee being higher for larger transactions. Additionally, the merchant may also be charged fixed fees for each transaction by both the issuing and acquiring banks.

  
  Payment Processors offer a variety of rates and plans that work out to between 1.5% to 3.5% per transaction.
  
  
• POS is all the other stuff like terminals, cash drawers, receipt printers, barcode readers, online menu ordering, inventory control, employee timecards, and anything else they can add in. See for instance the Clover website; Clover can provide stand-alone payment processing, but they prefer to bundle it with a whole suite of POS products.

This bundling of payment processing with POS can get confusing because POS providers don't always make clear the differences between Payment Processing and POS. Reading the CompareTech.co explanation of Payment Processing, however, its possible that many merchants just throw up their hands in confusion and happily turn it over to a POS provider to sort out.

Modules and new features

Sumer doesn't have modules because capabilities for new features are built into the Sumer core. But new capabilities will continue to be added, and each will open a range of new features.

Using Customer Relationship Management (CRM) as an example: one common feature of CRM is ability to collect and analyze information about customers to offer incentives, targeted discounts, email promotions, and more.

The Overlays, Dockets, and Schedules page showed how to use a 'Popin' feature to collect customer data.

The Extended Reports page how to filter a report. The ability to filter a report to summarize each customer and their total purchases is already built into Sumer. No template actually doing so yet exists, but a template could be built in less than an hour.

Any analysis possible in a spreadsheet can also be set up in Sumer.

But other capabilites to extend CRM are not yet in Sumer. They include:

• Adding the Popin feature to the Cashier Overlay frame, or
• Defining an incentive program to apply immediate discounts at the cash register.

Adding these capabilies will happen as Sumer continues to develop, the Popin feature for Cashier Overlay fairly soon.