Welcome to Heartland Retail!
This guide you through the most important setup areas and help get you up and running on Heartland Retail quickly.
Do you have specific questions about how to do something? You can access the Heartland Retail Help Center one of two ways:
(1) By visiting support.heartlandretail.us directly.
(2) From within your Heartland Retail account, click on the arrow next to your username, in the upper right hand corner of any page, and select ‘Help Center’.
You can also reach Heartland Retail via the in-app chat icon!
Setup Checklist: The free trial starts with setting up the 5 areas in the checklist below. You can easily return to this page by clicking the orange ‘setup’ option on the top navigation bar.
(1) Locations, Stations, and Drawers
Locations are physical places where inventory is located (a store or a warehouse) or virtual sales channels (an e-commerce website.) Each location has one or more stations. Once a location has been created, you can assign users to that location, add stations, and add cash drawers. A user can only be added to a location once they have been setup (see step 2 below). Stations are a physical point of sales or point of order fulfillment within a location. You will need to name your station(s) during this setup and each station can optionally have a cash drawer. Cash drawers must be set up before you can accept cash at a POS station. A single drawer can be shared by multiple stations and you can have a station that does not require a cash drawer as it does not accept cash. Cash drawers are created with a $0 balance. You will be asked to count the drawer, adding to the balance, when you begin using the Point of Sale.
You must create at least one location and station in order to process transactions.
(2) Users
When your Heartland Retail account was created, you were automatically set up as a user with an administrative role, which grants you all permissions. It's quick and easy to add additional users and to control what they can do in the system with roles that you create by assigning permissions to those roles.
For step-by-step guidance, please use this link to refer to our knowledge base on this function.
(3) Sales Tax
Tax Rules allow you to control how items are taxed at the point of sale. We recommend that you set up your sales tax rules before you set up your items as each item will need a ‘tax class’ (which you are defining here, under Sales Tax) so that the appropriate tax will be collected on the sale of that item.
For step-by-step help, please use this link to refer to our knowledge base on this function.
(4) Vendors, Items and Inventory
We recommend that you set up your vendors prior to importing your items, since you are able to specify a primary vendor on each item you create. For information about how to set up vendors, read this article.
In order to sell items at the point of sale, you need to first add them Heartland Retail. You can add items individually or in bulk via spreadsheet import. (Additionally, you’ll most likely want to add custom fields prior to creating any items.)
Once you have added your items, you can import physical inventory balances with a physical count. When you are ready to do your physical count, read this article.
(5) Credit Card Setup
With Heartland Retail you can process credit card transactions using Heartland Retail integrated credit card processing. To able to accept and process credit cards in Heartland Retail, Heartland Retail allows you to use just about any credit card processor. Before processing credit card you must first set up an account with one of Heartland Retail’s PCI compliant payment processing partners (Vantiv or First Data) or you can use Blackline Partner's gateway to integrate with a processor of your choice.
With Heartland Retail you can process credit card transactions in a stand alone terminal (that is not integrated, read this article on processing credit card transactions with a standalone terminal). You will set up a Custom Payment Type if you are electing to use a stand-alone credit card terminal. This will allow you to tender with this custom payment option and then process a customers credit card using said terminal. To create this go to: settings > payment types > new. You can then name it, add a description to it, and add any custom fields. Click save and this will now be an option when tendering a ticket.
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Once all 5 key areas on this checklist are checked in GREEN….
CONGRATULATIONS - you have set up the areas that are required to begin using Heartland Retail!
To further explore Heartland Retail, here are other areas that we recommend you set up:
(5) Adding/Editing POS receipt templates and Sales Invoice Templates
(6) If you will be integrating to your accounting system: Configuring QBO integration
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Getting Rid of the Orange Setup Button
Once you have finalized your account set up, the Orange set up button can be eliminated once you have all green checks. For example, if the credit card step is not complete (shows a red X), then go into that step and mark it as 'skip for now'. This will then turn the red X to a green check. You can then mark the set up as 'complete' which will cause the orange setup button to disappear.