BetaKit covered the launch of New York City-based ShopKeep’s iPhone application earlier in September, which gave merchants real-time access to their sales data from the company’s iPad point-of-sale (POS) system. Today the company announced the addition of a new time clock feature to enable merchants to save time by streamlining traditional payroll systems in hopes of better managing their employees. Since launching its iPad POS system in August 2011, the company now works with close to 4,000 Canadian and U.S. brick-and-mortar retailers to help them manage transactions and sales data via mobile devices.
“ShopKeep’s goal is to be more than a POS system, we want to help small retailers run their entire business, not just ring up sales. This was definitely something customers were asking for. We had all the tools in place, it was very easy to snap this on, and all of a sudden we’re saving them probably hours a month in time tracking,” ShopKeep CEO Jason Richelson said in an interview. “Because keeping track of hours for hourly employees is a huge amount of work, we’ve just made it so simple for them with the iPad they already have in their store.”
The new time clock solution lets merchants enter their employee information into ShopKeep’s POS system, with the ability to export the information for payroll purposes. Another pain point it helps merchants avoid is that it allows for easy adjustment whenever an employee may forget to punch in or out of their shift, in addition to being able to correlate sales data to measure employee performance.
“A big problem that I had in my grocery store was adjusting the time clock punches, because so many times people forget to clock out or they forget to clock in, and that was always such a pain in every other system to adjust that so that I could get my export file. We’ve made it so easy with a JavaScript widget to adjust very quickly or add a punch or adjust a punch, and then export into a file format that can be imported into your payroll system, that’s really where the time-saving comes in for managers.” Richelson added.
The new feature is available on the latest ShopKeep POS iPad app. The company also announced last month that it would be integrating mobile payment providers LevelUp and Dwolla, which recently announced its MassPay service, as part of its overarching strategy to consolidate apps and devices into its POS solution. The new features and mobile payment integration the company announced last month will help it to gain traction among its target market of small merchants, and stay ahead of competitors like Square Register, Square’s mobile POS system, and other mobile POS systems including restaurant-focused Breadcrumb, which was acquired by Groupon in May 2012, and Revel, another iPad POS system which is more focused on larger grocery chains and verticals within the industry.
The company’s engineering team will continue to focus on adding features for the company’s customers, with a new upcoming application announcement for the restaurant industry coming next week. With a focus on being a consolidated and all-in-one ecosystem that lets merchants do everything from processing sales, to tracking inventory, and now managing their employees, the company will look to be the iPad POS system of choice for small brick and mortar stores. With a lot of competition from big players like Square, the company will need to scale as quickly as it can in order to be one of the major players in the mobile POS space.
