Footwear & apparel retail
POS and stock control that
understands size and colour.
Most point-of-sale systems treat a shoe as one product. A shoe is not one product. It is a style, in a colour, in eleven sizes, and the difference between a good season and a bad one is whether you know which of those eleven you are about to run out of. incoDynamixRM was built for South African footwear and apparel retail, inside a working distribution business.
Footwear and apparel brands trading on our platform
The problem
Why does a general retail POS struggle with shoes and clothing?
Because it stores one number where you need a grid. A general system tells you that you hold 40 pairs of a style. It cannot tell you that 34 of them are size 11 and 12, that every size 7 to 9 sold out three weeks ago, and that the branch across town is sitting on the sizes you need.
One SKU per size is not a fix
Creating a separate product code for every size and colour technically works, and then buries you. Reporting fragments, purchase orders become unreadable, and nobody can see a size curve at a glance.
Seasons are not a tag
Winter boots and summer sandals do not just have different names. They have different lifecycles, different markdown timing and different replenishment logic. A season has to be a first-class part of the stock model.
Transfers are the daily work
In multi-branch footwear, most of your lost sales are stock you already own, sitting in the wrong store. Moving it needs to be a size-level request, not a spreadsheet and a phone call.
The core
What does a size and colour matrix actually give you?
A style is held as a grid of size against colour, everywhere it matters: receiving, selling, counting, transferring, reporting and buying. You see the shape of your stock, not just its total.
- Size, size-range and size-model definitions per style
- Colour codes with principal and secondary colour
- Pre-pack codes for supplier size runs
- Style, department, category and sub-category hierarchy
- Footwear attributes: heel, outsole (last), fabric and trim codes
- Gender and brand as reportable dimensions
- Barcodes generated per size and colour
- Price tickets and labels printed by size
- Stock take counted on the grid
- Transfer requests raised by size
- Season carried on the style and the markdown
- Replenishment models keyed on colour and season
Buying
Open-to-Buy, built in rather than bolted on
Footwear and apparel buying is a budget problem before it is a purchasing problem. The system carries the budget, the targets and the adjustments alongside the orders themselves.
- Open-to-Buy budgets with adjustments and parameters
- Daily sales targets, including per-employee targets
- Markdown provision percentages carried in the plan
- Purchase orders with order tracking
- Carton tracking and shipment costing
- Distribution and allocation instructions
- Release stock on hold, distribute backup stock
- Cross-border invoices and supplier payment forecasting
Season
How do you compare this season to the same season last year?
You define your seasons, however your buying calendar runs them. Season is stored on the style and stock is analysed season by season, so you see the shape of your range instead of one flat on-hand figure. Markdowns are costed against the season they belong to, so clearing an old range leaves the current one's margin intact.
Season-keyed markdowns
Markdown valuation and markdown costing are tied to the season, with provision percentages planned in advance rather than discovered at year end.
Seasons you define
Set up the seasons your business actually buys to, then stock on hand splits by them across the whole estate, so you can see what is genuinely current and what is carry-over before you place the next order.
Auto-replenishment
Stock models are built on department, category, season and colour, with minimum and maximum balance levels, so replenishment respects the season instead of blindly topping up.
Reporting
The reports a footwear buyer actually asks for
Around 90 reports ship with the system, plus an analytical cube for slicing sales by size, colour, brand, gender, season, store and supplier.
- Colour contribution
- Style performance
- Top and worst sellers by store
- Stock versus sales participation
- Stock cover and stock ageing
- Non-moving stock
- Category and supplier contribution
- Product early sales and replenishment
- Sales by teller, quantity, value and gross profit
- Transfers outstanding and mismatches
- Lay-by liability
- Daily, weekly and monthly takings
At the till
What South African footwear retail needs at the counter
- Lay-bys, with liability reporting and printed lay-by receipts
- Integrated card payment on FNB and Nomad speed point terminals
- Purchase, refund, pre-authorisation, cash-back, DebiCheck and QR
- Gift cards through Tutuka
- Loyalty and customer accounts
- Staff incentive (SPIV) tracking with printed commission dockets
- Maximum discount per salesperson, with head-office authorisation codes
- Blind cash-ups with variance by cashier and shift
- Inter-branch transfers with unit packing and receiving
- Click-and-collect through Pargo
- Bidirectional Shopify sync, size and colour mapped to variants
- Receipt printing and cash-drawer control
Straight answers
The three questions every retailer asks us
You will ask these in the demo anyway, so here they are first.
"What happens when the line goes down?"
The store keeps trading. Every store runs its own database on site, so tills, stock and lay-bys carry on whether or not head office is reachable. A store agent syncs in both directions and catches up automatically when the link returns, and head office can see at a glance which stores are online and which are not.
"Does my bookkeeper have to rekey everything?"
No. General ledger accounts are carried through the system, including separate cash, VAT, credit, goods-in-transit and lay-by control accounts, so takings land against the right accounts rather than as one lump. We integrate with most major financial systems, Sage and Pastel among them.
"Can I get to it from anywhere?"
Yes. There is a full browser application covering head office and store management, and a handheld app for work on the warehouse floor, alongside the till software running in the store. Sign in from any machine, in any branch.
Beyond the till
The warehouse and the delivery, on the same stock
Footwear and apparel groups rarely stop at the shop floor. WarehousePro handles receiving, putaway, unit and bulk picking, cross-dock, bin locations and dual-count stock takes, with barcode scanning on Urovo and Sunmi handhelds. incoDynamixXPS carries the load from there: bookings, waybills, trips, manifests, driver debrief, proof of delivery and parcel tracking your customers can follow.
They are separate systems, but they work the same stock and the same branches, which is why a transfer raised in a store is a picking instruction in the warehouse and a waybill on a vehicle without anyone rekeying it.
Bring us your worst week
Not a canned demo. Tell us the size curve that caught you out, the transfer that went missing, or the stock take that never balanced, and we will run it through the system while you watch.