Customer story: Needle in a Haystack

About the business:

• Type: Retail
• Location: Alameda, CA
• Employees: 4
• Payment Processing Terminal: Poynt

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Background

Cathe started Needle in a Haystack, a retail store that specializes in hard-to-find needlework supplies, after a successful career as a software engineer and engineering manager at Sun Microsystems. While Cathe’s customers rely on her extensive selections of fabrics and threads, she relies on (and loves) technology; Cathe is a self-professed geek who prefers tech blogs over the needlework blogs. Her focus on technology is what helped Cathe find her current POS system--Poynt--and subsequently Homebase.

How Cathe found Homebase

After reading about the latest and greatest in POS systems, Cathe decided on the soon to be released Poynt terminal. Cathe loves her Poynt system, especially how the terminal will “phone home,” or in more technical terms, get software updates on a regular basis. During one such software update, Cathe noticed that Poynt included Homebase in the “Featured Apps” section, and was intrigued by its promise of online time cards. Before Homebase, Cathe was weighed down by file cabinets filled with old time cards and receipts. [sp_review name="Cathe" position="Owner at Needle in a Haystack"]Not having all that paper has made my life SO much easier.[/sp_review]

About the business:

How Homebase helped

Cathe loves that Homebase integrates directly with Poynt, so that her employees can clock in and out for their shifts on the Poynt terminal. But where Cathe is saving the most time (and the most trees) is on transferring the timesheets to payroll. Before Homebase, Cathe was using paper time cards, and needed to physically go into the store to transfer the paper time cards to a manual spreadsheet each pay period. This became especially troublesome when Cathe wanted to take a much needed vacation, and needed to have someone go into the store and read out the data so she could enter it into payroll. What a mess!

Enter Homebase

Now Cathe can run payroll from anywhere, as she simply exports the timesheets data out into her payroll spreadsheet. Things like employee availability and time off are all now stored in the cloud for her, meaning she doesn’t have to physically track these details week over week. Moving to Homebase both “saved time, and just made life easier,” for Cathe. And the geeky part of her loves how all her time card data is stored in the cloud. “Now that I have Poynt and Homebase, I was able to get rid of an entire file drawer, as Poynt stores all my credit card receipts and Homebase stores all my time cards. Not having all that paper has made my life SO much easier.”