Hi Everyone,
Calvary Chapel Golden Springs has a full time retail store using an old POS called “Bookstore Manager.” Can anyone share what system they have migrated from for such an environment as ours? We are running 4 complete PC based registers (cash D, printer, barcode, etc.) on an isolated network. Our desire is to simply and yet provide the management with all the necessary tools to search inventory, order products, etc. Anything you can share would be appreciated.
We are currently using Bookstore Manager as well. Our accounting and administrative staff are hoping to move away from it, and from an IT perspective I’m terrified of the back-end which is using outdated programming languages and methods.
The manager of our bookstore, however, is fairly in love with the features and capabilities of the software, so we’ve had a hard time finding an alternative.
If you do find an alternative, I believe you can subscribe to the database that contains all of the Christian books that you can normally look up from within the POS, then just run that on a PC laptop that your staff can pass around when questions arise about books you don’t have in stock.
We’ve looked at several systems (Lightspeed, Revel, Lavu, NCC, and now Bindo) but haven’t settled on anything yet (we looked at Lavu only because we’re looking at them for our cafe, but they really don’t seem to be geared for the type of bookstore we have).
I’ll be following this and sharing what we find as we dig deeper, I’d love to get rid of this system if there’s a better one, but I want to make sure our bookstore is still able to function as well or better with the new system.
Hi Chris! What are the features does your manager like? I mean there are quite a lot of alternatives.
You have articulated all of my challenges very well, especially, since our Book Store Manager and employees love the feature sets. The technical backend can be very scary underneath the hood. Our other goal is to connect our inventory to a web store. BSM support doesn’t have a solution that makes sense at this time as well.
Our bookstore manager is going to soon be doing something with an online bookstore that reflects inventory, but I imagine it likely is more of a BSMGR specific solution that will likely not look as polished as just about any other system. 
Depending on the features you’re looking for, we have been using ShopKeep for the last 6 months or so and my Bookstore Manager loves it, inventory tracking seems to work well and is easy to manage. Hardware setup and maintenance is simple as well
Can you elaborate on the BSMGR online store feature? Contact at BSMGR?
We moved to Square Register for our bookstore. We found the one missing piece for us is tracking how much we paid for items in inventory so we could accurately tell how much we made/lost on items. The rest of the inventory features were okay, but we had to address this one component.
July 1 we added https://shopventory.com/. This integrates extremely well with the Square Register and gives great reporting. We are in the process of expanding from one bookstore location to three. Also, we are just starting to roll out Square Registers in our cafes. Once we get all locations added, we will look into adding the loyalty program. Being all on one system is going to help track/market to “customers”.
My only one frustration with ShopVentory is they currently to not have managed account access. So we just have one login to ShopVentory. They are working to add managed accounts so each person who logs into ShopVentory will have her/his own login. Note that only bookstore managers and accounting folks who need to run reports actually login to ShopVentory. All “sales clerks” still only login to the Square Register at the POS.
We also switched to shopkeep and our bookstore manager also seems to love it. My favorite thing about it is we installed it over a year ago and I don’t think we’ve received an email about it sense!
Good to know, thanks Kevin I will google that…
This topic was automatically closed 14 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.