Retail Accounting Software

UNIT4 Business Software has a 30-year track record of providing scalable, robust, proven software that is ideal for multi-channel, multi-brand or franchised retail organizations.  

Leading retailers – such as IKEA and those operating a multi-channel business, with many outlets, or undergoing significant change – tend to choose Coda Financials for its superior design and finance capabilities and the ease of integration with other specialist solutions that run their businesses.

Best-of-Class Retail Accounting

Creating a single IT system that can run across all operations in all retail organizations has proved an impossible goal. Retail sub-sectors – fashion, department stores and music retailers, for example – have widely differing requirements that a standard package or larger system would struggle to fulfill.

Its ability to easily integrate with any merchandising and point-of-sale systems and to handle the high volumes and complex requirements of retail accounting has driven its success in sophisticated retail markets like the UK, where it is the number one finance system – used by 25% of high street retailers.

Best-of-Class Financials for Best-in-Class Retailers

Best-in-Class retailers are shifting consumers' shopping experiences; enabling the ability to shop in stores, catalog, online and across new channels such as mobile. With new channels being introduced, it’s important for not only your front-end solutions to provide customer-centric data, but also for your back end solutions to provide real-time, accurate data for financial success. Even with accurate data, profitability analysis and forecasting can only be truly effective if there is a complete and seamless integration of the front- and back-office systems. POS and merchandising data are only made meaningful, when combined with the costing and revenue data in the retail accounting system.

Best-of-Class solutions – like Coda Financials - are able to withstand retailers' ever-changing environments, whether it’s a sudden variation in demand for certain product lines or new channel distributions through its flexibility and integration capabilities. Coda Financials captures the real-time data provided by your critical business systems, allowing you to spot a true picture of detailed profitability and emerging trends with better efficiencies and controlled costs. In order to achieve such consistency and control at the consumer-facing end, a centralized Best-of-Class retail accounting system can provide a superior level of cross-channel integration to deliver that single view of the truth between your business, pricing, and customer strategies.

The Finance System for a Multi-Channel World

As multi-channel retailing becomes ever-more complex, retailers are looking for financial solutions that can provide a single clear picture of their business. They need systems that can consolidate information from physical and virtual retail platforms and reflect the very different approaches to accounting in different countries. And, with constantly evolving consumer trends and product lines, retailers need to be able react rapidly to change.

Coda Financials, the industry’s leading retail accounting package, addresses these specific needs. It has a unified architecture that is open and flexible, media neutral, highly scalable and offers a real-time view of enterprise interactions. It provides trading information specifically for the finance department, and links easily with a company’s POS and Merchandising systems to ensure complete integration with the accounting solution.

Real-time Analysis and Visibility

The Coda retail solution provides comprehensive reporting capabilities and powerful data control to provide greater visibility across the company. It was designed to enable better analysis and control of profitability, analyzing individual performance by store, department, cash register, or sales representative at whatever level of detail is required. It also allows managers to spot emerging trends within days, rather than the weeks or months that traditional finance systems can take – in retail, a week is a long time! Coda can provide insight into long-term trading trends, enabling retailers to make financial decisions based on more than just the bottom line.

The large volumes of data generated by POS and Merchandise systems also necessitate a system that is capable of automating as many business processes as possible. The Coda system offers high-volume invoice matching and, through its seamless integration with a company’s front-end systems, reduces rekeying time – minimizing manual intervention, which saves time and money.

Seamless Integration with Merchandising and POS

Our financial management solutions seamlessly link your financial system to your merchandise and POS (point of sale) environments, giving you:

• the missing link between POS and finance
• user-definable integration facilities between core business systems and Coda Financials
• the ability to analyze sales and purchasing information by user-definable analysis categories
• service ordering facilities
• the ability to handle concession accounting
• sophisticated high-volume invoice matching facilities
• the ability to view information daily or weekly, yet report monthly
• the ability to summarize item information at user-defined category levels
• accurate business intelligence in real time.

Spend Management

One of the most under-automated and under-controlled functions in many retail organizations today is the process for managing indirect expenditures. Indirect expenditures constitute items and services consumed in the normal course of operating a business, such as: office supplies, store fixtures, IT equipment, software, maintenance supplies, cleaning supplies, professional services, real-estate services and other outsourced services. Although indirect spend isn’t the largest expense category for most retailers, it can be ripe for savings and process efficiencies. Hence, indirect spend automation represents a “low hanging fruit” opportunity for companies looking to increase earnings relatively painlessly. The beauty of indirect spend savings is that savings fall directly to the bottom line, without closing operations or leaving you to agonize over layoffs. You can increase earnings per share – without increasing revenues or enduring painful cost reductions.

Coda Financials offers you a truly end-to-end spend management solution, covering the whole cycle from requisition through to payment. Our Spend Management module reduces costs by providing fast, controlled, online access to key procurement functions to all employees, and also delivers accurate budgetary control over expenditure. It helps retailers establish controls and consolidate purchasing activity across all stores, and positions you to leverage the full buying power of the organization.

Local and Global

Coda Financials’ unrivaled levels of interrogation can be performed either at store level - empowering local managers to understand and manage their operations better – or centrally at the head office and the changes then implemented locally as appropriate.

Rapid distribution of financial and statistical data, to and from all areas of the business, is another area in which many retailers often struggle. Coda allows retailers to access information ranging from individual store promotions and loyalty schemes to logistical information, easily and simply via the Web. Reports and online access can be easily made available to management around the organization.

The flexibility of Coda’s retail accounting solutions, combined with their international and currency handling functionality makes them ideal for the fast-moving, increasingly international retail industry. Coda supports global roll-outs with a financial system that is not only multilingual and multicurrency, but also multicultural. Our solution’s extreme flexibility means that as retailers expand into other countries, they can reflect the very different approaches to accounting in those countries (as well as ensuring that they can meet specific local fiscal and legal requirements), and all within the same version of the system. It can be run in multiple languages simultaneously, and can handle any number of currencies with unlimited exchange rates.

Retail Accounting via the Cloud

UNIT4 Coda Financials flexible approach to on-premise, cloud or hybrid deployment allows retailers to put the best business systems in place, keep them up to date and optimized, and reduce in-house IT infrastructure. Retailers hosting their accounting software in the cloud are able to retain the interoperability and functionality of UNIT4 Coda Financials and gain greater flexibility, scalability, and security. Visit retail accounting via the cloud to learn more about how cloud computing can modernize your retail accounting software.