An owner of three to six shops or cafés usually has their data in three places: the tills in each location, 1C in accounting, and an Excel sheet where someone stitches it together. The sheet shows up at month end, when it is too late to change anything.
We went through this in our own retail chain, PIVOTEKA, and the dashboard we built then grew into our product Klaro. Here we describe the problem and the fix, whichever tool you end up using.
Why the numbers in Excel do not match
Three causes show up at almost every client.
- VAT. Till revenue includes VAT; cost from 1C does not. Subtract one from the other directly and the margin comes out inflated by exactly the tax rate. The calculation is worked through on Klaro: a margin inflated by exactly the tax rate.
- Different rates. Bread, dairy and sugar are taxed at the reduced 8% rate, everything else at 20%. A single divisor, "revenue divided by 1.2", distorts net revenue: why you cannot just divide by 1.2.
- Refunds and voids. If they are not taken out of sales, the store looks better than it is.
On top of that come products with no cost in 1C. They have no margin at all, and on average they quietly pull the figure up or down.
The tax service sees your sales before you do
Tills connected to SIA "MEV" send sales to the State Tax Service in real time. The state knows the next day how much each location sold; the owner finds out at month end. What that means for a shop is covered on Klaro: your till already reports for you.
How to connect the till and 1C without changing anything
The technical side is simpler than it looks if you keep three rules.
- Read-only. The connection reads data from the till and from 1C and writes nothing back. Nothing changes at the point of sale; the cashier never knows it is there.
- Regular sync, not real time. Every half hour is enough for management decisions and puts no load on the store's systems.
- The data stays with the company. A separate installation per client with its own database, instead of a shared cloud. Sales and margin are not data you want sitting in the same place as your competitors'.
What the evening report should contain
A good report answers one question: what happened in the chain yesterday, and where did the money go.
- net revenue per location and for the whole chain, excluding VAT and net of refunds;
- real margin, using cost from 1C;
- what sells: the products that make money, the ones that sit on the shelf, and the trend;
- each location against the chain average: who is falling behind and by how much;
- products with no cost, so you know how far to trust the margin.
And it has to arrive by itself. A dashboard you have to open gets opened rarely. A Telegram message at the hour the owner chose gets read every evening.
What such a connection does not solve
It is not a till, not accounting and not a replacement for 1C. If you lack stock records or your first till, start there. A nice report on top of incomplete data just shows a more convincing mistake.
Build it yourself or take a product
If you have a developer and a single till type, the connection can be written in-house. It takes longer than it first seems, because of VAT, refunds and products with no cost.
If you do not want to maintain one more system, Klaro does exactly this: it connects to your existing tills and 1C, syncs every 30 minutes and sends the report to Telegram at the hour you choose. It runs at FITMIN, a pet-store chain, and at STEFAN'S COFFEE. Prices are public on the site: from 599 lei a month for one location.
If your integration does not fit a ready product, with a different data source or a different accounting system, write to us: that is our custom-development side.