Boys and Their Toys or Mike is Having WAY Too Much Fun!

Owning a business does come with some interesting perks. A few months before we opened the first store, we got our POS computer system. It's basically a touch screen cash register system that can do all kinds of fancy reports for us on our sales and labor, and it has a credit card swiper built right in. When that came to our house, we had a good time playing around with it and learning how to use it. I felt like a five year old girl again, giving Mike my order and "playing" coffee shop :)

After the store opened, the fun of the new machine kind of wore off. When we opened the second store, we realized that we had a little bit of a problem. The two computer systems needed to be linked somehow, so that gift cards purchased at one store would work at the other. That meant that everything would also be linked to a central computer, which we decided for that to be our home computer. So since that time Mike has been working with the software company to get all these things linked so that everything would be straightened out. Most of it was linked, but there were a few things left to finalize this week. We are happy to say now that it is all worked out and things are running great.

Mike is even happier to say that he has his new favorite toy. One of the features of having everything linked to our home computer, is that we can pull up the computer screen from either store and see it in real time. Meaning, we know when there is a customer order being taken, we know what that customer ordered, we know what it cost, how they paid. We see the exact same screen that the employees see at the store. Not only that, but we have control of the store systems from our home computer. This is where the fun comes in- Mike had a blast doing things like opening the cash drawer or writing cryptic messages like "I'm watching you" to freak the employees out. I think most of them are in the know by now, but Mike has gotten such a kick out of it. It is pretty cool that we can do that, and it's also exciting to see what's going on at the store. As I type this, someone has just ordered a piccolo size gelato and paid with a gift card! :)

Ah the simple joys in life!