Happy Birthday, Capo!
04/30/24 08:50 AM
Happy Birthday Capo!
tl;dr - It’s our first birthday and ClerkHound is kickin’ ass!
How it started…
Some years ago Chris Mitchell had an idea: Point of sale for music retailers, focused not just on barcodes and receipts, but on building customer relationships. ClerkHound would bring together merchants and their customers using off-the-shelf hardware and any web-enabled device, like a Mac, PC, tablet, or smartphone.
In 2023, ClerkHound became a reality through a partnership with Laura and Russell Thackston, founders of Thackapps. ClerkHound officially launched at the NAMM Show in April of 2023 in Anaheim, California, and, in the months since, has signed up over a dozen retailers across the nation.
How it’s going…
When we launched in April of last year, ClerkHound supported the most in-demand features: sales invoicing, customer orders, quotes, repair orders, purchase orders, employee timesheets, and most importantly, automated recurring billing. Beyond that, we also supported manual and swiped card transactions, store credit, gift cards, product images, product barcodes, and digital customer/product tags.
Even though we were adding more and more satisfied merchants to the platform, we weren’t content stopping there!
In the first year of operation, ClerkHound has seen some major improvements. Here are a few…
Soon after launching, in partnership with Maast, we released CheckingHound: free business checking services for our merchants with next day deposits of their credit sales.
We quickly provided merchants the ability to email customers directly from ClerkHound and to attach their invoice, customer order, quote, or repair order. Suppliers and vendors could also be emailed directly from the app, allowing purchase orders to be sent directly to the sales rep with a click of a button.
We created a merchant dashboard, giving our customers access to the most important details about their business, such as customer follow ups and recurring billing issues.
By customer demand, we added integration with Reverb, the online marketplace dedicated to buying and selling new, used, and vintage musical instruments.
We soon added data import functionality to efficiently onboard new merchants’ product, supplier, and customer lists. Even though we launched with all the necessary core reporting features, such as sales, transaction, and timesheet reports, we added export capabilities for nearly all elements of merchant data, making the data accessible and giving our customers the ability to perform their own analytics. In keeping with our core values, we committed to always giving our customers easy access to their business data.
We added SMS capabilities to ClerkHound, giving merchants the ability to text their customers directly from their Mac, PC, or smartphone, while maintaining a centralized, accessible record of all communications.
We launched BillingHound, a standalone recurring billing service for those merchants who don’t require a full point-of-sale application. Businesses providing lessons or rentals, but not retail sales, benefit most from our reliable, automated billing system.
We added an inventory reconciliation process to ClerkHound that has been lauded as fast, efficient, and impressively accurate.
We secured a partnership that allowed us to offer free credit card readers to new merchants, allowing them to accept cards using a swipe, dip, or chip. Even from a smartphone!
Most recently, we added support for tracking employee commissions, from quote to invoice. This popular addition to ClerkHound provides excellent incentives for your associates to build strong, lasting customer relationships.
There are so many more features we’ve added that are too numerous to mention. We’ll just close out by saying we’ve implemented over 270 features, large and small, at the request of our customers.
What’s next…
As far as we’ve come, we’re not about to sit back and rest on our laurels. We’ve got new features to build and new merchants to onboard. Here’s a preview…
- Online storefront for merchants
- “Pay online” invoices direct to customers
- More dashboard widgets for better visibility into store operations
- Serialized inventory
- Rental inventory
- Integrated shipping
