Guides for independent supply stores

Buy online, pick up in store works for an independent hardware, garden, paint or feed store when the website reads the same live inventory the counter sells from, and the rest (staging, notifications, payment) is will-call process your team already knows.

Someone told you your hardware store needs an ERP, so here is what the word means, the six functions you are really asking for, five signs you have outgrown a plain POS, and where a store system like Rundoo stops and QuickBooks starts.

A greenhouse retail POS is less a special category of software than a checkout plan that holds up at the bench, in the bulk yard, and in a line that triples on the first warm Saturday, so here is how to map it, staff it, keep it connected, and get it ready before spring.

Why a general retail POS fails to handle tinting, and what color matching, formula sync, and catalog search should actually look like when the sale starts with a gallon and a fan deck.

There is no honest single number, but every POS quote breaks down into the same six budget lines: hardware, software, payment processing, data migration, training and support, and the cost of leaving your current system.

A 2x10 is bought by the unit, stocked by the piece, quoted per MBF and sold as fourteen pieces plus a cut, so here are the eleven things a yard needs from its POS and inventory software that a hardware POS never had to do, with a test for each.

The plain answer to the question every store owner asks before switching POS: which data comes with you, how accounts receivable and tax settings are handled, and how everything gets verified before go-live.

Every POS vendor says it syncs with QuickBooks, but that can mean per-sale invoices, a nightly summary journal, or a file your bookkeeper imports, and for a store with charge accounts the question that matters is where your receivables live.

Intuit discontinued QuickBooks Desktop Point of Sale on October 3, 2023, and it still opens but gets no patches, support, or payments, so here is how a supply store picks a replacement that keeps the books in QuickBooks.

A buyer's guide to lumberyard POS systems in 2026, from Epicor BisTrack, ECI Spruce, and DMSi Agility to Flitch, GenetiQ, and Rundoo, with a plain answer on which kind of yard each one fits.

Benjamin Moore dealers run a mix of Epicor Eagle, Decor Fusion, and newer cloud systems including Rundoo, and here is what a paint store POS needs to handle, from tint integration to CCP rebates.

Cycle counting replaces the dreaded once-a-year full count with about an hour of daily counting that keeps on-hand numbers honest, catches shrink while the trail is warm, and never closes the store.

Dead stock is retail inventory that has stopped selling, and here is the routine to define it by days since the last sale, size it in dollars, clear it without wrecking your margins, and keep the next batch from piling up.

A working guide to hardware store inventory management, from clean distributor item data and honest counts to bins, labels, and reorder points that stop guessing before the shelf goes bare.

How to calculate inventory turnover and GMROI with a worked example, why turns differ so much between fasteners, power tools, and seasonal, and why GMROI is the better lens for a supply store.

Landed cost is what a product cost you by the time it was on the shelf, freight and fees included, and the way you split one freight bill across the lines on it can move a fitting's cost by a third, so here is the formula, three allocation methods, a calculator, and what it does to margin.

Open-to-buy turns 'we always buy heavy in March' into a number per department per month, with a stop line, and here is the formula, the five inputs, a worked April for lawn and garden, and which reports fill the worksheet.

What connecting a POS to Orgill involves, and how Rundoo automates the catalog, ordering, receiving, and price changes so the data moves itself.

The reorder point and safety stock formulas worked through one lawn fertilizer SKU, then fixed for the weekly distributor truck, late deliveries, and the season, and translated into min and max.

Shrink is the gap between what your books say you own and what the count finds, and independent home improvement stores average 1.7% of sales with a median of 1%, so here is the formula, the seven places it hides in a hardware or feed store, and how to measure it without closing.

A spotlight on Rundoo's distributor integrations, leading with Emery Jensen and working through AllPro, House Hasson, Blish-Mize, and Lancaster, with every connection labeled as shipped or in progress.

Every garden center POS promises to sell by the flat, the yard, and the ton, but few show you how to set it up, so here is a calculator for mulch, soil, and stone, a begonia sold three ways, and how your system should handle each unit of measure, cost, and price.

One product, one base unit, every other unit a conversion: how a hardware, electrical, feed or garden store sets up wire by the foot off a reel, fasteners by the each out of a box, and feed by the bag or the ton without running two SKUs for one pile of product.

Surcharge, cash discount and dual pricing all chase the same card cost, but they follow different rules and fit different stores, and for a store whose contractors pay statements rather than swipe at the counter, the biggest lever is not the sign on the door.

Surcharging is legal in most of the US, but the card networks, your state, and your processor each get a vote, so here are the caps, signs, and receipt rules, with the statute linked for every state that has one.

Markup divides profit by cost and margin divides it by price, which is why a 40% markup is a 28.6% margin and why two owners who both 'make 40 percent' can be eleven points apart, so here are the formulas, the conversion table, a calculator, and the three places the mix-up costs a supply store money.

What a house account is and how to run one well: credit limits and terms, monthly statements, a worked AR aging report, and how finance charges are calculated and regulated.

Contractor charge accounts are the financial backbone of a paint store, and doing them right means house accounts, per-customer pricing, clean statements, real aging, and a way for painters to pay from their phone instead of the shoebox-and-spreadsheet workaround a general POS forces on you.

A POS that can invoice customers is not the same as one that runs charge accounts, so here is the thirteen-point checklist for real charge accounts, a six-step demo script, and straight answers on how Rundoo measures up, limits included.

A resale or tax exemption certificate only protects your store when you take it complete, check that the purchase fits the buyer's business, verify the number where your state offers a lookup, and keep the paper where an auditor can find it, and contractors are where the rules get tricky.

The farm tax exemption belongs to the farmer, but the audit risk belongs to the store, so here is how to collect the right document, exempt the item rather than the person, and keep a paper trail that survives an audit, with Texas and nine other farm states.