About StoreDesk
Because the margin report took a Sunday afternoon
StoreDesk started as a spreadsheet, a stack of supplier invoices, and the nagging feeling that nobody actually knew which items were making money.
The problem
The back office ran on paper and retyping
Reports come off the register on paper. Fuel tank readings come off another printout. Invoices come in a stack. Every week someone sits down and copies all of it into a spreadsheet by hand, then reconciles the spreadsheet against the paper it came from, because that is the only place the numbers ever meet.
Changing prices is its own afternoon. The Commander can do it, through an interface that was not built for a person updating a few hundred PLUs in a sitting. The software sold to fix that wants a monthly fee for what amounts to basic price-book work, or wants the whole operation in a web app that stops the moment the DSL blinks.
And then there is the sales tax return, worked out from the same retyped numbers, in a form that has to be right.
So StoreDesk reads the register directly and keeps it on your own PC: the price book and what you actually pay for each item, the daily and shift reports, the fuel readings, and a Georgia ST-3 return built from the same data you already have. No retyping, and nothing to reconcile against a printout.
Everything on this site describes software that exists and runs in a store today.
Two things are being built and are not here yet: EDI, so invoices from H.T. Hackney and the other distributors that support it land as costs without anyone typing them, and a lottery module for settling the daily ticket count. Until they ship we list them as planned, not as features.
What we hold to
Four rules the product is built around
Your data stays in your store
Sales figures, margins and supplier prices are the most sensitive numbers a small retailer has. The cloud side of StoreDesk knows your store exists and that your licence is paid. It does not know what you sold today.
It has to work when the line is down
Rural stores lose internet. A back office that turns into a blank screen when that happens is not a back office, so everything that matters runs on the PC in the room.
The register is the source of truth
StoreDesk reads from your Commander, and only sends something back when you have turned that on and a person confirms it. Nothing is pushed to a till automatically. If StoreDesk vanished tomorrow, the store would keep trading.
No feature nobody asked for
Plenty of store software is sold on the length of its feature list. We would rather ship six things that work than thirty that mostly do.