IBIS offers a simple way of managing pay-and-display advertising for brochures and other marketing material within your information centre. To configure, please follow the steps below.


TABLE OF CONTENTS


Set up brochure advertising items to sell

  1. Setup your brochure display advertising types as a new retail item in the Retail items screen located under the Point of sale menu. 
  2. All operators you wish to invoice for brochure display must have their account use set to Point of sale in the Accounts screen.

 

Selling advertising through Point of sale

  1. Take the Brochure Display retail item to Point of sale.
  2. Select Payment, then Account or Charge to Account from your POS menu. (Note, if this payment type is not available, see adding new buttons to your system).  
  3. Select the account you wish to charge to from the list
  4. Add a note such as 'Brochure Display' which will appear on the invoice, then select OK 
  5. A pending transaction will now appear in the Invoicing screen for the account, ready to generate into an invoice. (NB: ensure the Invoicing screen filters are set to 'Show' POS on Account). 

 

Tips & tricks

  • Add new buttons to the Point of sale screen for your brochure or other advertising items so staff can quickly find them.
  • Identify a paid advertiser to your staff from within the ticketing screen by setting up a contact group.
  • Sort the ticketing tree by Contact Group by enabling the Global Setting.
  • IBIS does not handle recurring invoicing or expiry notifications and we recommend managing this in a separate system if required.

 

Track brochure orders

Once an advertiser has paid to display their brochures in your visitor centre, you may wish to track the quantities of brochure stock you are ordering so at the end of the advertising period, you can provide them with an idea of the volume of brochures you are moving through your centre.


In order to track brochure order quantities via IBIS, you must use the IBIS Stock module. Without the Stock module, you can still set up the brochures as items, however, you can only track enquiries via Point of Sale as outlined in the next section.

  1. Setup a non-consignment supplier in the Contacts screen called Brochure Advertising (or similar).  
    Note - if you set up each operator as a retail supplier, this will increase your administration time at step 5     so we recommend just one.
  2. Open the Retail items screen and select your Brochure Advertising supplier from the list.
  3. Add a new stock item for each brochure, entering the name of the Operator / Brochure in the Item description field. Each brochure must be configured with a unique PLU code.
  4. Set the Group or Subgroup to 'Brochure Display' so you can easily report on or exclude this group of items from your stock reports.
  5. Once the brochure is complete, open the Stock Purchase screen and create new purchases order each time you restock quantities for these items.
  6. You can review the orders and sale quantities anytime using the Stock Ledger screen.

 

Track brochure enquiries

Tracking brochure movement through IBIS gives you the opportunity to show an advertiser how many times your team recommended their product over an advertising period.

Your sales team can track the brochures they have handed out by processing a 'sale' through Point of Sale for each brochure item and settling the transaction with a $0 value cash payment. Staff can process the sale quickly by training them to use the keyboard shortcuts P (for payment) then C (for cash) followed by Enter.


There are a few considerations for how to enter the PLU codes quickly into the Point of Sale screen. Labelling each brochure with a barcode is costly and setting up buttons and/or submenus could still make the sale process longer than necessary especially if you have a significant volume of brochures at your centre. Some options available to you for looking up a PLU code quickly are:

  • Use the Item lookup screen from the Point of sale menu. 


    If your brochure items are set up and/or grouped with a unique Supplier code in the Retail items screen, your staff can quickly search a list of relevant brochure items to add to POS. E.g. Out-of-town Accommodation brochures might have a supplier code of 'OTA'. If your staff member enters '? OTA' then Enter into the POS input box, all the items with that supplier code will show instantly in the Item lookup screen so they choose the correct one to add to the sale.

  • Keep a printout list of brochures with the PLU code and/or bar code behind the counter so staff can quickly scan or enter the PLU from the sheet.

To report on brochure sales by PLU code, item group or subgroup use the standard retail sales reports in IBIS (i.e. Point of Sale > Sales Summary or Stock > Sales reports).