Garden Centers and Nurseries

Lawn and garden retailers nationwide depend on NCR CounterPoint as their POS system to manage their diverse lists of vendors, monitor a constantly changing inventory, and streamline the majority of their day-to-day operations. With its quick return on investment, ease of use, and extensive offline capabilities, NCR CounterPoint has quickly become one of the most popular POS options in the green market.

CounterPoint includes an inventory management system, customer loyalty programs, touchscreen point of sale ticket entry, detailed sales history tracking, and reporting capabilities that out perform all other POS systems in the class. Control your purchases, track your customers by their individual receipts, and even open an online store with this all-in-one software solution.

We really need to get a handle on our inventory. Can NCR CounterPoint help?

Today’s independent garden center carries an incredible variety of inventory products, from live trees and shrubs to annuals and perennials, bagged products, bulk materials, and more. NCR CounterPoint is the leading POS solution for Garden Centers because it includes inventory control features capable of managing such a diverse inventory.

At Soft Intelligence, we like to say, “Inventory is a discipline, not a system”. So our main focus when training our new and existing customers is to help them get the full benefit out of inventory. Whether it’s accurate costing, correct on-hand counts, proper descriptions (with botanical names), bar code control, and printing. CounterPoint offers it all!

NCR CounterPoint offers many benefits for inventory control in the Green Industry

  • Short and long descriptions.
  • Support for service items like planting and deliveries
  • Support for botanical and Spanish names
  • Care instructions
  • Multi-units of measure, i.e. sell in the pack, the half flat or the flat with only one item in
  • inventory.
  • Unlimited Bar Codes per item tracks multiple growers and/or multiple colors for a single item
  • Grids (One, Two, or Three-dimensional grids) for clothing and shoes. Ex: Sizes, Size, and Colors,
  • Size, Color, and Widths)
  • Price by ton or pallet and sell by the pound or square foot

We have a lot of seasonal and part time employees. Is NCR CounterPoint easy to use? Is it easy to train new employees?

How quickly can you train a new user on your POS system? Is it a keyboard or code-driven? Is the layout clunky? With the custom Touchscreen in NCR CounterPoint, every garden center can layout their point-of-sale sales screen to match their needs. What’s your bestselling item in spring? Hanging baskets, flats, 4” pots? Setup a button with those items on the first page. Do you sell items as a group, like trees with planting and delivery? Our Touchscreen can walk your POS clerk through the sale of each service so no revenue opportunity is missed. Left-handed employees? Setup the buttons on the left-hand side of the screen for just them. Orders, Layaways, Special Orders? No problem. Your custom Touchscreen will walk the employees through the exact steps to complete an order, layaway or special order.

Benefits of NCR Counterpoint’s POS Touchscreen in the Green Industry

  • Easy to use / Fast to train
  • Custom point-of-sale Touchscreens by season
  • Most popular items as buttons
  • Full bar code and scanning at checkout
  • Quick item and customer lookups
  • Easy to enter and configure Orders

During our peak season, we have long lines at the checkout registers. How can NCR CounterPoint help?

Abandoned carts are every garden center and nursery’s nightmare in season. With so much of your business condensed into such a short selling period, every customer, every cart, and every purchase counts. So getting your customers through the line as fast as possible is the key to a successful implementation of your new POS system.

From the time a customer pulls their cart up to the register, NCR CounterPoint will give you incredible speed at checkout. From customer lookup to easy buttons for the fastest moving items to bar code scanning to fully encrypted 2-second credit card authorization with NCR Secure Pay, CounterPoint will move your customers through the line faster than you thought possible.

How does NCR Counterpoint speed up checkout?

  • Custom Touchscreens per season
  • Most popular items as buttons
  • Unlimited bar codes per items ensure all items come up when scanned
  • Easy to use Orders and Special Order process
  • Easy to use Layaway Process
  • 2-second credit card authorization
  • Signature Capture support
  • Debit support
  • Multiple credit card clearinghouse support

What happens if my system goes down? We can’t be without our system while we are in season!

To keep our retailers running all the time, NCR CounterPoint offers Offline Ticket Entry. Basically, with Offline installed, as long as your registers have electricity, they will run. When your system comes back online, the tickets rung in Offline will automatically synchronize back to your central data server. And if you have invested in NCR’s 1500 series “All in One” units, you can add 4-hour or Next Calendar Day support to your hardware. Total security that your Counterpoint POS system will be there to work for you, day in and day out, rain or shine!

Our current system is very difficult to get information out of and does not offer the reporting we need. Why should I think your system will be any different?

NCR CounterPoint not only has the reporting a retailer needs, it also has all the reporting a garden center or nursery needs. In addition to over a 1000 predefined reports, NCR CounterPoint goes above and beyond by giving you the ability to configure your own sales and inventory reports. No need to learn a complex report writer or a programming language. Simply select the data you want and voila, you have your report. Don’t want a printed report, NCR CounterPoint lets you simply and easily download data directly to a spreadsheet. Only NCR CounterPoint offers simplicity with the power to access your data when and where you want.

The hottest reports in the green industry, all standard with NCR CounterPoint:

  • Weekly Category/Department Reports with Sales, Qty, Profit % and $
  • Vendor Analysis Report
  • Retail Valuation Report
  • Inventory Performance
  • Inventory History
  • Top 100 (or 200 or 300) Customers
  • Best selling / Worst selling items
  • And easily define users’ reports…

We need a software support company we can count on. How are Soft Intelligence and NCR CounterPoint different?

Besides the selection of your software package, the partner you choose to support you is the single most important factor for a successful implementation. We opened our doors in 1984 and installed our first point of sale system in 1992. We have the experience and the expertise to make sure you get the support you need. At Soft Intelligence, we do CounterPoint Right! In 2011, NCR polled CounterPoint customers worldwide to rank customer service among NCR Business Partners. Soft Intelligence was ranked #1 worldwide among the customers using CounterPoint. When NCR called owner Joe Masarek to learn the secret of his success, Joe replied, “We just take care of our customers”. Sounds simple, doesn’t it?

Actually it is simple when you have the #1 support staff in the world. With multiple employees with 30+ years of experience, Soft Intelligence averages 19+ years in CounterPoint experience per support member. But experience alone doesn’t make Soft Intelligence number one. What does make our support staff the envy of NCR Retail world is our empathy and our sense of humor. When Sherry McCassey, the head of our support department, was asked why she was so effective at her job, she replied, “Because I’m so damn smart”. She laughed and added, “I care about the customer, and I care about what happens to them.” And that, in a nutshell, is why our support department is ranked #1.

The final piece of the support puzzle is your investment in support. As a retailer, we understand that you have to keep a close eye on your bottom line. Soft Intelligence offers affordable annual unlimited support contracts, block support, and per-incident support. Many of our customers find annual contracts to be their best investment. Unlimited support for a small monthly investment that you can budget is the best fit for most of our customers. However, whether you choose an annual contract, block time or per incident, our support staff will do everything they can to make sure you are treated with the respect you deserve and you get the help you need. And we may even make you laugh in the process.

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