Once I opened and received my retailcloud welcome email, I went to the management portal as it recommended to update my default settings. I entered my store information and sales tax rate for the store. I imagine that this will all show up on the POS receipts.

Next, I exported the data from my current system and checked the UPC numbers and noticed that some of the numbers were much smaller than others, in looking further, I realized that the leading zeros were not being exported from QB. I got on retailcloud chat to see if there was a way to get them and they told me not to worry about it as they had a flag to append leading zeros in their solution.

"Already loving the retail made simple concept."

I knew that not all of my items were in my current POS system and so I emailed some of my suppliers to see if they could give me a listing of what I bought and the two that could do that, gave me a listing that had departments and categories which I could not use previously. I made a note to try to incorporate this in my new setup. Not being an excel prodigy, I was having difficulty combining all the data so back to chat I went and they suggested I import each file separately or i could open a ticket and send the files to them and they would have a look at them. I decided to continue with importing individual files.

The import was fairly straight forward, I followed the instructions on the retailcloud support portal and put in the minimum data plus the starting balances from the files I brought over from my current POS, and I used the classifications that my suppliers provided me in their files to do that. One of my challenges was trying to find my current cost as the retailcloud system kept an accurate cost of goods sold while my current system used my last cost. I decided to not worry about the items I did not know the costs for and just estimated them or if the quantities were really low I used a cost of 0, and figured it would turn out ok if it was a product I bought a lot of and did not matter if it was something I did not buy a lot of.

Once the imports were done I received an email for each file telling me what was successfully imported and which items failed. I forgot to check for items that appeared in both my pos file and the supplier file which was not a huge issue, but I also had some trouble with special characters in my descriptions. I fixed those and then ran a product listing and an inventory balance report and my 7000 plus items looked good; I had made a lot of progress in less than an hour.

I then downloaded the application from the retailcloud app store on my desktop POS. Remembering the advice from the help desk (it takes 15 minutes to do it slowly and 3 hours to rush it) I read the instructions on the support page first and then installed and registered the application and signed in. I ran a couple of transactions and everything work as expected. I was pretty happy with myself.