Customer Case Study: Key West Key Lime Shoppe

A New Twist

Kermit Carpenter has been providing "all things key lime, all the time," for the past seven years out of his bakery and gift shop, The Key West Key Lime Shoppe, in Key West, Florida. The store sells everything from key lime pies, cookies, lotions, soaps, marinades and much more. Kermit has seven employees who prepare all products on-site in The Shoppe's kitchen to sell at the store, local restaurants or on www.keylimeshop.com.

Carpenter has relied on Intuit's QuickBooks® financial software to easily track and manage his finances since he first opened his doors in 1995, all the while keeping an eye out for a solution that would allow him to integrate his entire business — from tracking inventory and checking out customers to reporting and closing the books at the end of the day.


The Challenge: Making Things Easy as Pie

While Carpenter was impressed with the functionality of automated Point of Sale (POS) offerings on the market, many were extremely complex and time-consuming or far out of his small shop's price range. When Carpenter went to his local office supplies store, he wasn't able to find a POS system designed for small businesses.

Carpenter had been lobbying Intuit "for years" to come out with a POS product that would integrate with his QuickBooks data, and was thrilled to be among the first to try Intuit's QuickBooks Point of Sale solution (which includes point of sale software plus a bar code scanner, receipt printer, cash drawer, and credit card swipe). He knew from his past experience with Intuit that the company's products would deliver the results he was seeking and give him time to focus on other aspects of his business.

"The set-up interview for QuickBooks Point of Sale made it easy to identify the features that would be most useful to my business and had me up and running in no time" said Carpenter. "It is incredibly easy to use, and my staff required no formal training. But the real benefit is the instant integration with QuickBooks financial software."


The Solution: QuickBooks® Point of Sale

Carpenter is extremely happy with QuickBooks Point of Sale, and has seen measurable timesavings since he began using the product. "The QuickBooks Point of Sale solution saves me almost an hour a day, and I don't have to double-check the calculations anymore," he said.

The integration into his QuickBooks financial software means that summarized sales data is automatically downloaded into his financial records, eliminating duplicate data entry and ensuring accuracy.

By making an affordable, easy-to-use point of sale solution available at the places that small business owners shop, Intuit is able to help smaller retailers achieve the same benefits that larger stores get from their automated systems, including:

Inventory Management QuickBooks Point of Sale allows retailers to track up to 50,000 individual items in real time for an accurate picture of stock availability, item pricing, and more. "I am able to track items more closely and with various price points, including wholesale and employee discounts, " said Carpenter. "The anytime access to this data also helps to identify which categories of merchandise are stocked or what is being returned, so that we can adjust our inventory accordingly."

Customer Tracking QuickBooks Point of Sale allows Carpenter to track who is buying what, and use that data to further build his business. Carpenter is able to store customer information, including name, special interests, contact information and items purchased. This data can be used to alert loyal customers to special sales, seasonal merchandise deliveries and more, making for a more personal shopping experience.

Reports "The reports are phenomenal," raved Carpenter, "I'm able to track my best-selling products, my top-performing sales people and even most frequent customers, which I was unable to find time to do before, "said Carpenter. The solution allows Carpenter to generate more than 30 unique reports and to track the source of sales (phone, Internet, promotion, etc.), "It's great to be able to monitor this and know that we are spending our advertising dollars in the right places," he commented.

This case study represents the individual experience of one customer. Intuit does not guarantee that results will apply to all customers.

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