Hi Hassan,
Following up from our meeting — really useful walkthrough. To put together a proper blueprint and a meaningful MVP price, I need a bit more detail on a few things. Take your time, no rush. Even partial answers are useful — we can fill in the rest on our next call.
I've grouped them so you can work through them in chunks.
1. The Magnum product export (the big one)
This is the single most important thing. Without it, any new system is guesswork on day one.
- Can you push the Magnum vendor for a full product export — ideally one Excel file — with all of these columns per product:
- Barcode
- Internal / SKU code
- Product name & description
- Cost price
- Retail price
- Stock on hand
- Minimum stock level
- Maximum stock level
- Supplier name
- VAT category / rate
- Department / category
- If he won't or can't give it in one file, get me whatever combination of reports he can produce. I'll merge them. The product list export with barcodes you found is a good start.
2. Volume & scale (so I can size the system correctly)
- Roughly how many transactions does the shop do per day on average? (A busy-day vs quiet-day range is great.)
- What's the average basket size in £?
- Of the 11,500 products in Magnum, roughly how many are actually live and selling vs dead stock that's been sitting in the file for years?
- Roughly what's the split of how things are sold:
- Barcode-scanned (pre-packaged)
- By weight (screws, nails by the kilo)
- By length (timber, etc.)
- Manually keyed (no barcode, no weight)
3. Customers & credit accounts
- How many trade customers currently have credit accounts?
- What's the typical credit limit range? (e.g. £500 – £5,000)
- Roughly how many credit transactions happen per week?
- How do they usually pay it off — in person, by bank transfer, or both? Any common patterns?
4. Suppliers
- Roughly how many suppliers do you buy from? (5? 20? 100?)
- Do any of them send digital invoices or product price lists (CSV, Excel, PDF) that you could forward me one or two examples of? That tells me how easy / hard supplier-side automation would be later.
5. Staff & operations
- How many staff in total, and how many are working the counter at any one time?
- Are any of them already comfortable with computers / new software, or will training need to start from scratch?
- Could the shop run a new till in parallel for a quiet afternoon as a pilot, or does cutover have to happen all at once / overnight?
6. Hardware we already own
- Could you take a quick photo of the back/underside of one of the receipt printers — I just need to read make & model off the label.
- Same for the barcode scanner.
- Internet at the shop — what connection type (fibre, regular broadband, 4G)? Any drops during the day?
7. The business case
- Do the owners have a rough budget ceiling in mind for a project like this? Even just "definitely not above £X" is enough — it stops me proposing something that's a non-starter.
- What's the realistic earliest you'd want the shop to be on a new system — 3 months, 6 months, a year?
- The second-branch idea — is that something the owners are actively planning, or more of a "would be nice one day"? It affects how much multi-branch capability I bake in from day one.
8. Cost-of-problems (for our pricing conversation)
You don't need exact numbers — rough estimates are fine. This is what I'll use to justify the investment to the owners.
- Credit reconciliation mess — roughly how much staff/management time per week is lost to chasing what customers have actually paid vs what the system says?
- Stock losses — any rough sense of stock that's "gone missing" or that you thought you had but didn't, in £ over the past year?
- Lost or delayed sales — how often does a customer leave because something's slow (slow till, slow receipt, can't take credit, etc.)? Once a day? Once a week?
- Price queries — how often does someone ask "when did this price change?" or need to update prices and not know where to start?
That's everything. Even if you can only get me items 1, 3, 4, 7, 19, 20 to start, I can begin shaping the blueprint and we fill in the rest as we go.
Speak soon,
Ilya