Industry & Business

Envisage Cloud, Ireland’s largest Sage systems integrator and software developer, is launching its ‘Connections’ solution in the UK market. Envisage Cloud expects to generate €1 million in new revenue from the retail software solution.

Connections helps retailers to manage their back office tasks in a fast and efficient way. The solution is already available in Ireland and Envisage Cloud is aiming to implement the software in 3,000 store locations across the UK within the next three years.

Supported by Enterprise Ireland, Envisage Cloud will create five new jobs and invest €300,000 in technology, training, marketing and sales to achieve its targeted UK growth. The new roles will be in software development, product management and sales.

Connections is designed to maximise administration efficiencies for retailers and is ideally suited to franchises and multi-store businesses. Envisage Cloud has seen particularly strong demand for the solution in the forecourt and convenience store sectors.

The software captures all fuel, shop, café and deli transactions that go through a retailer’s tills and automatically updates these sales transactions to their centralised accountancy software. This avoids the task for bookkeepers of having to manually input this data into the accounting system and enables complete profit and loss statements broken down by store departments.

Connections also automates the process of managing supplier invoices and delivery dockets. Businesses with multiple stores can receive thousands of invoices per week and Connections removes the need to manually check these invoices against deliveries to ensure stock and price accuracy. By automatically posting invoices and delivery dockets to the accounting software, Connections drastically reduces the amount of manual data entry required.

Ray Ryan (pictured), director, Envisage Cloud, said: “Bringing this innovative solution to the UK market is a hugely exciting step for Envisage Cloud and one we have put a lot of hard work into preparing for. We have invested years in building unmatched relationships with EPoS providers and store suppliers to ensure virtually every UK retailer can avail of Connections regardless of their existing software.”

The introduction of the UK government’s Making Tax Digital policy has been a big driver for organisations to implement reliable accountancy systems. Connections enables retailers to easily integrate their accountancy software with their electronic point of sales (EPoS) systems – aiding tax compliance, eliminating the need for countless spreadsheets and providing them with a concise picture of how their business is performing across different department.

Ray Ryan concluded: “With Brexit causing so much uncertainty in the market, retailers are increasingly focusing on what they can control. Businesses are looking to technology to ensure they are doing things in the most efficient way possible to maintain profit margins. Integrating systems, streamlining processes and capturing accurate and up-to-the-minute reports of business performance are all ways of gaining the competitive edge. Connections now enables UK retailers to do exactly that.”