Franchise

Improve the value of your retail franchise with Erply

Erply’s retail software platform offers the tools to help you help your franchisees, giving them the tools to succeed and in turn strengthen the value of your franchise brand.

Finding Balance

No two franchise businesses are alike. In balancing control over brand vs. franchisee flexibility, you will have created your own specific set of business rules. Can franchisees create their own promotions? Can they choose some or any of the products they carry? How much information can be shared between stores? The answer to these questions is different with every franchise.

Erply offers a franchise solution where a “Master” account is used to control what items and data are shared with franchisees. Each franchisee is provided with their own separate Erply account, which synchronizes with the “Master” account. This allows for quick updates, such as weekend sale pricing changes, to be relayed to all franchisees within minutes.

Setup Variations

Within Erply, you have a lot of flexibility to configure the system, and we can match our functionality to perfectly match your own business rules. That said, we see two common approaches to setting up a franchise.

Centralized

A centralized franchise is one where the franchising organization has a lot of power and can (and does) dictate the rules to franchisees. Franchises like these provide a consistent, repeatable experience for customers, generate more centralized, shareable data for the franchisees, and create leverage against suppliers. They have less flexibility in franchise operations, but in return, they gain the benefit of more useful information from headquarters.

Semi-Centralized

A semi-centralized franchise is one where the franchisees hold power. The headquarters may be more of a partnership or conglomerate. Franchises like this will typically share a core set of products and certain brands. Otherwise, individual franchisees may sell additional products and services the other locations aren’t interested in. They will generally have their own rules about staffing.

Cross-Chain Promotion

With Erply, you can push marketing campaigns, with predefined start/end dates, to all your stores in minutes. Set everything up from the HQ account, and franchisees don’t need to do anything. Erply collects sales data from all your franchisees to give you insights into which promotions are working. You’ll know which ones you should repeat and which ones you should not.

Central Purchasing

Erply’s flexible configuration setups enable the franchisor to create central purchase orders for all locations. This generates leverage over suppliers and also leads to bulk quantity pricing. Quantities from the central purchase order can then be distributed to each franchisee accordingly. Franchisees with more than one location can also take advantage of this ability when creating orders for their locations. The order is delivered to that franchisee’s main warehouse and then distributed to the other locations as needed.

Central User Databases

Erply’s modern cloud-based solution makes centralized databases easy. Authorized personnel in the master account can create User Groups, User rights, and restrictions across the entire organization from a central point of access. This makes it much more efficient to both gather pertinent information related to sales, commissions, timeclock records, and more.

House Accounts & Credit Customers

Erply enables the setup of a House Account and credit customers, allowing shoppers to make purchases against an allocated credit limit. You can define your own terms for payments and late fees. A full report of paid or unpaid invoices gives you visibility into your cash flow and enables quick email reminders or printouts as necessary.

Analytics

It’s one thing to get franchisees on board with the latest offerings from corporate. It’s an entirely separate task to obtain the analytics to review ROI and make smart decisions for the company. Erply’s Franchise synchronization technology allows franchisees to define what reports they would like to have from each location and have this data automatically sent up to the “Master” Erply account. From both ends of the spectrum, Erply has you covered, making your job easier than ever before.

Private Cloud Setup

Erply’s cloud-based implementation allows for a remote setup of the entire HQ environment. Because we’re hardware agnostic, you can use your existing hardware and avoid taxing upgrade costs. Our implementation team is available to provide any necessary professional services to ensure a smooth rollout.

Store Credit & Gift Cards

With Erply, you can ensure a seamless customer experience by enabling the use of store credit and gift cards across any franchise location. The centralized database in the master account enables you to see all customers with store credit, and where the credit was applied. Depending on your franchise culture, you can optionally make gift cards and credit franchisees specifically. It’s up to you.

Plugins

Erply’s rich library of plugins provide us with an array of options to offer additional solutions not initially visible in standard Erply. If there’s a needed enhancement, chances are it may either already be available in our existing plugin library or an existing plugin can be enhanced to meet requirements. We also entertain customizing new plugins to meet demands.

Ongoing Support and Training

Erply offers support 7 days a week with dedicated phone hours from 8 am - 11 pm EST. Support agents are also available to provide training packages covering specific processes and workflows in the system, for you, your franchisees, and their teams.