Kashmoo technology allows users to access the company’s software from anywhere.

There are numerous applications that enable retailers to operate and analyze various aspects of their businesses. Selecting the right system can be difficult because each offers features to evaluate, benefits to weigh and prices to compare.

“In the past, a business would have to use many different programs to do everything,” Maria Cauchon of RFMS noted. “Today’s technology allows those tasks to be joined and integrated using one software package.”

Regardless of the system, once your business information is stored in your computer, experts say the true power comes from being able to leverage that data in various ways. “For example, your customer job history can be useful in finding all the hardwood installations you did several years ago as potential re-sands when work is slow,” Mike Myhre of WinSched said. “Analyzing your profits on previous jobs can help you give more accurate estimates in the future.”

CDMS Carpet Dealer Management System enables dealers to manage a full range of floor coverings beyond carpet.

Software modules enable store operators to manage various aspects of their business, from order entry, purchase orders and cutting/picking orders to payroll, sales and purchase analysis, scheduling and estimating. “The software has evolved over its 25- year history to be accounting intensive, filled with audit trail reporting and extensive data history,” CDMS’ Cathy Welsh explained.

“It is designed to work as well for a single store dealer as it will for a multiple store, multiple company dealer.”

In addition to providing core business management software, RFMS has developed additional tools tailored to meet a variety of user needs. One such product is estimating software called RFMS Measure, which allows salespeople to easily estimate quantities and illustrate seam diagrams and material cut sheets. “RFMS Measure offers dealers the luxury to employ great salespeople and designers to sell and let the software do the estimating,” Maria said. “It gives the customer the room scene in a 3D rendering, plus Measure calculates the quantities and then creates the order seamlessly inside RFMS or even QuickBooks.”

Added benefits include accurate quantity calculations that eliminate material shortages, and to ensure proper installation, a legible seam diagram and cut sheet.

QFloors offers user-friendly software designed to help efficiently manage flooring retailers of all sizes. Fully integrated, it organizes, records, administers inventory, sales, accounting, ordering, payroll, scheduling and other operations. It enables a user to not only set the parameters for reports, but also dictate how those reports are viewed and printed. “A new offering being released at the end of first quarter is the QReporter, an optional add-on feature allowing business owners to customize reports or invoices to their specific requirements,” Chris Ogden said. “A person can not only set the parameters for the reports, but also dictate exactly how those reports are viewed and printed.”

In a successful retail operation, many people must interact and communicate to make things happen as they should for the customer. The Kashmoo Scheduler enables dealers to easily manage their schedules from one Web-based system. It allows users to share multiple calendars with their team, such as installations, estimates, company and personal calendars.

“Everyone in the entire flooring operation, from the salespeople in the retail showroom, to people who do the ordering, receiving, accounting, and even in the warehouse, can view these calendars so they instantly know the status of every job they are tracking,” Mark Magnuson said.

“People can add notes to the jobs to communicate without calling or sending faxes or emails. Furthermore, with a ‘Google-like’ search, they can quickly locate anything that has ever been entered in any field or note.”

Not to be outdone, Win-Sched Software is said to be flexible and provides many of the powerful features necessary to schedule efficiently. Win-Sched allows you to control which users can edit data and settings and keeps a history of who changed what, and when.

Auto-scheduling saves time and gives dealers an overview of resources available, while the Document Manager helps organize many documents relating to a job, such as floor plans, inspection reports and measurement request forms. “The ability to design custom reports and export to many different standard formats like Adobe PDF, Microsoft Outlook, Word and Excel lets you quickly find your data and convert it to a form you can easily use,” said Mike Myhre, president. “Email features help you automatically notify people who need to know when changes are made to schedules.”

Pacific Solutions offers a host of software programs for the industry, including Floor Manager, a networked management assistant that streamlines the entire information flow in your business and FloorRight estimating software. One of the latest developments from Pacific Solutions centers on remote database synchronization on two levels. For the franchise or buying group, Pacific Solutions empowers them to broadcast labor and product catalog revisions to remote users or satellite offices. When a Franchisee or satellite branch synchronizes its database with the corporate office, the information is retrieved via the Web and the local version of the software receives the updates.

“Essentially this creates a proprietary B2B, without any development expenses or deployment of FTP sites,” Don Kilbourne said. “When the synchronization occurs, Pacific Solutions software can also retrieve sales data from the remote users and compile the collected information in a data warehouse for the purpose of evaluating industry sales trends.” The same technology can be used at the store level when a business owner desires to close jobs in the field when he lacks access to his local area computer network or an Internet connection.

FloorLink.net from Floor Covering Soft is a sales team management system that tracks marketing and sales activity in real time. It is ideal for flooring retailers, distributors and contractors who need to manage sales teams and multi-location operations. With FloorLink.net, you can track things like lead generation by ads/campaigns and its assignments to reps, conversion rates of each sales rep and contact history, potential sales revenue in the sales pipeline to be closed in the next two months, and comprehensive lead and sales activity reporting.

“FloorLink.net is a new breed of software solution that integrates marketing, sales lead tracking, measuring and estimating and B2B product catalogs into a Web-based system, so a flooring retailer can efficiently manage its sales force, track sales pipeline, ads conversion rates, and follow-ups,” Steven Wang said. “The benefits are an enhanced retail sales rep conversion rate and a shorter sales cycle.”

Aya Associates offers Comp-U-Floor software, which is utilized by retailers, distributors and importers in the flooring industry. The software is designed to automate core business functions such as purchase order processing, accounts payable/receivable and sales analysis. Two versions of the system—Fully On-line, and Decentralized Off-line—provide the best of all worlds to clients by allowing some stores/warehouses located at remote locations to be connected to the central computer online through the telephone lines, and yet other locations having their own PCs may process locally during the day by sending the data at night.

“Our Comp-U-Floor software is based on Microsoft’s Windows operating system and uses the Microsoft SQL as the database,” said Edgar Aya, president of Aya Associates, “a ‘must’ for large databases and multiple users operating concurrently in a multi-store and multi-user environment.”

RollMaster believes the Internet is the network. “We believe that installing, synchronizing and updating software installed on individual PCs is obsolete,” said Dev O’Reilly, president of RollMaster. The typical RollMaster product offerings available today are Web-based business management software (which includes integrated accounting, job costing, one-step quotation to invoice functions, tax reporting and multiple methods of automatically computing commissions as generating financial statements), Web-based B2Bexchange, Web- based estimating, electronic signature capture, document scanning and integration with job cost, bar coding inventory control (in & out), generating purchase orders via the bar code scan, quickly generating proposals, one-step tracking of job cost, installation scheduling, Webbased job measuring, sample tracking, tracking billed vs. unbilled job progress and many other features.