Convenience Store Menu

What Is A C-Store ?........
The Convenience Store systems ties all convenience stores and consignees to the rest of the system. Note that we refer to a convenience store as being any customer with a number greater than '00' in the C/Store Group field on the second screen of AR08. We set a customer up with a number in that field if we want to receive a C/Store Profit and Loss Statement on that account and use any of the functions associated with the C-Store subsystem in dealing with that customer - such as meter readings, inside sales, fuel adjustments, transfers of oil from the warehouse to be sold at a store, etc.

One report that does not appear on the menus is the Convenience Store Commission Report. On the second screen of AR08, there is a field for a convenience store commission percentage. You may choose a percentage from 1% through 99% that you will pay a consignee you deliver fuel to. Check out this report if you are doing that sort of thing in your operation.

A brief discussion pertaining to C-Store fuel operations will be presented now in an effort to help you understand how the system handles the gasoline, diesel, and other fuels at the store level. If you find any of the material difficult to understand I suggest you reread this section until you do understand it.

All fuel inventory which comes into the system passes through a real or pseudo "bulk plant" accessed through the program IN01. I say "pseudo" because you don't actually have to have a bulk plant to use the system; however, the system has a bulk plant inside of it which it uses as if it were a real one.

When we purchase inventory, we add it into the inventory subsystem by using PS04 which is the bulk plant inventory purchase program. This inventory may be purchased into a myriad of different inventory accounts with the C-Stores pulling fuel from these accounts. At no time does the purchase of inventory pass the fuel into the store's tanks. This is done through ST17.

The purchasing of this inventory into "pseudo" bulk plants, constantly manipulates these inventory account's weighted, moving-average cost fields with each purchase. (We do not recommend having a separate weighted moving-average cost field for each store even though it is possible, but rather carry the fuel in pools with similar cost averages).

You may have twenty (20) different fuel types at your convenience stores. However, since there are a possibility of 9,801 pools for each inventory item, the supply is virtually infinite. Cost averaging works this way:

We have 1000 gallons of No-Lead Shell Brand Inventory with a weighted moving-average cost of $1.00 per gallon. A purchase comes along at $1.10 per gallon. The system takes (Number Of Gallons On Hand * Current Average Cost) plus (Number Of Gallons Purchased * New Cost) and then divides the whole thing by the total number of gallons to recalculate the new weighted moving-average cost for that bulk plant inventory item. In this case we would end up with a total of 2,000 gallons at $1.05 (average cost) which represents exactly the amount of inventory investment for No-Lead Shell Brand in the general ledger and the inventory subsystem.

When fuel is taken to a convenience store (dropped through ST17), it is not removed from the pseudo bulk plant, but it is added to the store's book inventory. The fuel brand dropped, is tied to a specific inventory account through the 'Fuel Type' field in ST07 (Tank File Maintenance) for that store. If taxes are due on the move to the store (drop) as in the case of some Mississippi fuel, then the taxes are handled in the general ledger at the time of the drop, as set up in Tax File Maintenance & Inquiry (TX09).

When the meter readings or gallons are entered for a company operated store or for a consignment location through either ST18 or imported from the ScotSystem Satellite interface, at that time the sale actually takes place the cost of sales is determined by the weighted moving-average cost for that fuel type and brand the day the sales are processed during CLAR05.

At the time the sale is entered, the other applicable taxes, which become due on sales, are accounted for and the cost of the fuel is added to the store's cost of sales accounts.

Obviously, the more often the store sales are entered, the more accurate the information will be; however, either way, this method has proven to be far more reliable in determining real cost at the C-Store level than any other method tested.

Outstanding Benefits:

Daily Profit and Loss Statements:

I can't overemphasize the need to track convenience store activity and profits on a daily basis. With the exception of depreciation (which is normally posted on a monthly basis), as an operator, you need to know daily how you stand at each of your stores. Typically, convenience store reports arrive at the office two or three days or even later from the day the business occurs. Customers using our Satellite product or StoreReport, have the distinct advantage of knowing by 9AM each day, the status of each of their convenience stores. But you don't have to have either of those products to get accurate information from the ScotSys/2000 convenience store system.

Regardless of how you choose to get your data to the system, the full functions of the ScotSys/2000 convenience store system is available for you to use. Daily fuel tracking, profit from convenience store sales, up-to-date inventory values, and expenses by category, are all needed if you expect to maximize profits in these stores. Because no matter how accurate your information is, if you receive it too late to take action, what good is it?

Fuel Tracking:

If you are responsible for tracking the fuel at your location, you'll love our fuel log. It tells you each day; how many gallons you started with, how many gallons you sold and delivered, what you should have in inventory, what your managers said their stickings were, and the variance between their sticks and the computers calculations. This information may also be made available to SIR technology companies. If you've got a leak, you'll know it the day the leak starts.

Support for Consigned Fuel:

By setting up a customer as a consignee in AR08, you will be able to track a consignment dealer's sales, calculate profits, and produce a commission report on demand.

Fuel Sales:

Fuel sales may be collected from Satellite, StoreReport, or they may be entered manually through ST18. You can enter meter readings, or let the computer track the meter readings for you. Price changes during the shift are no problem for ScotSys/2000 and meter change outs are a snap.

Fuel Taxes:

All fuel taxes are set up in TX09 and handled by pump in our convenience store modules. If you are one of the unfortunate jobbers who must pay sales taxes on fuel and fuel taxes, or generate taxes on drops rather than sales, ScotSys/2000 has provisions for those tax occurrences as well. Taxes are automatically extracted from pump prices and carried to the proper general ledger accounts. When adjustments occur, prepaid taxes are written off to the various 'Fuel Taxes Lost' accounts in the General Ledger. All you have to do is to run the supplied reports to get the information.

Non-Fuel Transfers:

Our program de-unitizes warehouse inventory and transfers it to any of the convenience stores in your company. You may specify that part of the profit be taken at the time of the transfer so that the convenience store doesn't get the benefit of all of it. This allows you to look at the store as if it wasn't owned by an oil jobber. If you ever decide to sell the store, you can see how this could be an advantage in showing actual profits. See our Non-Fuel Transfer program for more information.

Blending:

Blending at the pump is becoming more and more popular as new convenience stores are being constructed. ScotSys/2000 provides full support through ST30 for these types of pumps and stores.

Vendor Analysis:

Is your vendor getting to you? You can maintain a labor-intensive price book and spend hours examining the detail, or you can use ScotSys/2000 to provide quick and accurate vendor analysis by department. After all, if we are making more profit on candy purchased from one vendor over another, does it really matter what we paid for the Snickers? See ST23A for more information on this subject.

Comparison Analysis:

The ability to track convenience store sales is built into ScotSys/2000. Our Comparison Reports track inside sales over a two year period and fuel sales over a three year period. Satellite and StoreReport can track them over the life of your system.

Integration to Satellite:

An optional program ScotSystem Satellite, runs on Windows 98/NT computers at the convenience stores and provides for the seamless integration of your convenience store's daily activity into ScotSys/2000. Typically, one office employee can handle the paperwork from seven stores in the course of a day. Your operators may take more or less time, but eight hours per seven stores is typical. The average convenience store operator has five convenience stores. This means the average operator's office employees take six hours each day going over the daily store's paperwork.

Satellite will cut that time down to less than sixty-eight minutes. One of our customers handles the data from twenty-three stores in less than three hours. At fourteen minutes per store, one-hundred stores can be processed by only three operators in the course of a day.

While the reduction in labor cost is the primary motivation that most of our customers have cited as the reason to install Satellite, the improvement in accuracy cannot be downplayed. Satellite helps the store managers balance up to twenty-eight shifts per day (normally three) on their store computers. When the data arrives at the office, it's ready to be proofed and processed.

With ScotSystems Satellite, profit and loss statements should be on your desk when you arrive for work in the morning.