How to Automate talech

A salon, a cafe and a hardware store run the same register

talech runs the counter in restaurants, cafes, retailers and service businesses, and it belongs to Elavon, which is part of U.S. Bank. It is also mid-rename: the talech site now says the product is becoming Elavon Point of Sale, with the change rolling out in stages, so a business signing up today may meet it under either name. The card processing and the software come from the same company either way.

The register is the familiar part. Orders, discounts, refunds, exchanges and store credit. A product file with barcode labels and stock counted in real time. Staff logins and hours worked. A customer record building up quietly behind the transactions. Service businesses get appointment booking on top of it, retailers get online ordering for pickup, and it runs on a countertop unit, a handheld or a phone.

For a lot of these businesses it is the only piece of software in the building.

The register closes and the phone comes out

Nobody here is employed to do the back office. The owner does it, and the owner has just finished a shift.

So it happens standing up, on a phone, in the twenty minutes after the door is locked. The daily report is opened and skimmed. The low-stock email is read and half remembered. The card deposit is checked against what the day felt like, roughly, because doing it properly means signing into the bank and matching a batch against a total. Two suppliers would get looked at if there were time, since the last delivery came in at a price nobody had agreed to. Tomorrow's appointments are counted and the gap at eleven is noticed but not filled.

None of this is skipped on purpose. It is skipped because the person who has to do it has been on their feet since seven.

talech

The alert with prices attached Each item below its threshold priced at the suppliers you buy from this morning, with anything now dearer than the last invoice flagged, before the order goes in.

Yesterday's batch, found or missing The card total compared with what actually reached the business account, so a short settlement becomes a question this week.

Tomorrow's book against tomorrow's staff The appointment list read against who is rostered, with gaps and double bookings named the night before rather than at opening.

Inventory alerts fire on the shelf, never on the supplier

More of that is already handled on the register than people expect.

Inventory is tracked in real time, with barcode labels printed from the same product file. Inventory alerts carry a warning threshold per item: the register warns an employee who adds a low or out-of-stock item to an order, and a daily email goes to the account owner and any designated employees listing everything that has fallen below its threshold, which is where a purchase order starts. Reports can be scheduled daily and weekly instead of pulled by hand. Staff access and hours worked are tracked, service plans add appointment booking, and retail plans add online ordering for pickup.

What all of those have in common is that a transaction on the register set them off. The alert knows a shelf is empty. It does not know what refilling it costs this week, whether the supplier has stopped listing the item at all, or whether yesterday's card batch reached the bank. Those three answers live on three other websites, and a register has no reason to open any of them.

The low-stock email can arrive already priced

That daily alert is a good starting point for something more useful than a reminder.

The same list, with every item priced at the two or three suppliers you buy from, this morning, against the prices on the previous order from each, so an item that costs more this week than last is called out on the sheet the order gets written from. The items a supplier has quietly stopped listing marked as gone rather than as low, because that is a different problem with a different answer.

Yesterday's card batch compared with what actually landed in the business account, so a short settlement becomes a question this week rather than a discovery at year end. Pickup orders from the online store added to the counter's day, so the figure is one number. On the service side, tomorrow's appointment book read against who is rostered, with the gaps and the double bookings listed the night before. Gift card and store credit balances totalled, so the liability is known before an accountant asks for it.

Reading and comparing can run overnight. Placing an order, messaging a customer or refunding a card is a decision, and it stays with whoever owns the shop.

Turning an alert into an order takes three logins

The alert says the shelf is empty. Getting from there to a costed order means opening three supplier sites and reading them properly. The only real question is whether that is a person's twenty minutes.

WebRun is an agent that works a real Chrome browser, signed in as you are. It opens talech, your suppliers' trade sites and your bank, reads what each one says, and leaves the answer somewhere you will see it before you open up.

It runs on your schedule in your own private environment, and a workflow can be locked to a named list of sites. You can watch a run and stop it. Nothing that spends money or reaches a customer goes out without you saying so.

Each workflow below names what it opens and what it brings back.