Alerion XMT Is Alerion XMT Worth It?

Extended Management Tools

You May Ask Yourself, Is Alerion XMT Worth It?

The answer to that is, what is your time worth?

Many people have asked whether or not the software they are about to purchase is worth the price tag. Whether the software was for word processing, image editing, accounting, entertainment, or even point-of-sale. While the price of these vary, you want to be sure that you are benefiting from an investment in any type of software.

When it comes to Alerion XMT, there are many benefits it provides like reducing theft, increasing profits, and better analytical tools. Let's take a look at just one benefit to see if it is worth the price of admission - time savings.

Why is time savings so important? Well, we all have a fixed number of hours in a day and if we can save some of it, we can devote it to other activities like, growing the business, planning, or more leisure time. What would you do with an extra 30 or 45 minutes a day?

So let's get back to Alerion XMT and see how it can save you time. We asked the retailers using the software to come up with some of the best time savers in Alerion XMT and here are some of their suggestions.

Notifying customers with overdue rental items

This is a daily task where your clerk will run a report for all the past due rental items then begin calling the customers to remind them to bring in the items. While each store is different, an average number of calls per day would be about 21. The average call takes 2.5 minutes, so the time spent on this task is 52.5 minutes.

With Alerion XMT, you use the automated email system to notify your customers of past due rentals which requires nearly no time. However there may be 4-5 customer that you have to call because they don't have an email address. So if we subtract those 5 customers from the 52.5 minutes, we get an average time savings on this task of:

40 Minutes

Moving new releases to catalog

Here is a task that you may perform weekly or monthly. You run a report for movies that were purchased within a certain time frame, pull them up in the point-of-sale systems to adjust the pricing code, then move the physical rental item from the new release wall to the catalog area.

Where Alerion XMT can save you time is in the running the report to find out what titles need to be moved, and changing the pricing code for you automatically.

While the number of movies that come out each week vary, a good average would be 7 new titles a week. Which means you have to bring up 7 titles each week and change their pricing codes. This on average takes about 1 minute per title for a total of 7 minutes. The time to run the initial report to see what to move takes about 3 minutes. So if we add these two together, we get a time savings of:

14 Minutes

Auditing Employees

This task alone can save you hundreds and even thousands of dollars and is perhaps one of the most time consuming and difficult tasks to perform. Let's take a look at some of the basic auditing you should be doing.

Going through each receipt every day. Here you are looking for odd behaviors like excessive coupon use, rentals going out for zero, and items manually priced just to name a few. Another task would be to spot check your inventory to see if rental product is going out the door outside the system (not getting checked out). On average, a retailer would spend 25 minutes a day performing this basic auditing tasks.

Alerion XMT has a dashboard that quickly alerts you of odd behavior in the store like: manual priced items, product deleted, coupon used, gift cards deleted, privilege overrides, time clock modifications, late fees deleted, manual rewards issues, and A/R balance edited. These actions and more can be viewed in about 1 minute. This is a savings of at least:

24 Minutes

Purchasing Merchandise

This task will vary based on the amount and type of merchandise items you carry. While Alerion point-of-sale will provide you a list of items that need to be reordered, Alerion XMT gives you the ability to automatically generate a purchase order for each vendor for the items on the list and sent it to them via email. Retailers have reported to us this saved them:

30 Minutes

Calculating Employee Commissions

Without an automated system to compute commissions, the task is daunting but doable. Retailers go through each receipt and tally by employee the commissionable sales; which takes about 60 minutes per month.

With Alerion XMT, you simply press a button and the commission figures appear which saves you:

60 Minutes

Title Profitability

Every retailer wants to know what titles are making a profit and which titles are a flop. This information helps you to form decisions on future movie purchases. Alerion XMT speeds this process up with a Title Profitability Analysis Tool which instantly shows you financial data about your rental product like, cost, turns, number sold, rental revenue, sales revenue, and profit/loss in a grid (spreadsheet) style. This instant access to profit numbers saves:

60 Minutes

Now bear in mind that the examples I have presented are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to time savings and there are many more features that will save you even more time.

Do The Math

The cost of Alerion XMT for the first year is $595.00, and each year thereafter is $200.00. So let's break down the cost of Alerion XMT per day.

	First Year - $595.00 XMT / 365 days = $1.63 cost per day
	Subsequent Year - $200.00 XMT / 365 days = $0.55 cost per day

Now let's figure out how much time you would save with just the examples above. Some of the tasks above are performed daily, some weekly, and some monthly, so we will adjust the time to a daily savings.

Task	Frequency	Time Savings (Minutes)
Notifying customers with overdue rental items	Daily	40
Moving new releases to catalog	Weekly (Divide by 7)	2
Auditing Employees	Daily	24
Purchasing Merchandise	Weekly (Divide by 7)	4
Calculating Employee Commissions	Monthly (Divide by 30)	2
Title Profitability	Weekly (Divide by 7)	8
	Time Saved Per Day	80

So with Alerion XMT you can:

	Save 80 minutes per day for a cost of $1.63 for the first year
	Save 80 minutes per day for a cost of $0.55 for subsequent years

Your results may vary based on the features you use in Alerion XMT, and if you have two or more seats (Alerion Point-of-Sale) the subsequent year's fee for Alerion XMT goes down to ZERO!! But don't forget, I only mentioned a few of the many time saving features XMT has to offer, and there are other benefits in XMT that can increase your profitability.

What's Your Time Worth?

Doesn't saving 80 minutes a day for a mere $1.63 sound like a good trade? You bet it does. Let's put some numbers to that. Assume you pay yourself or an employee $15.00 per hour. With 80 minutes in time savings, the dollar value in salary is $20.00 per day. If you are spending $1.63 per day and getting back $20.00 in time savings, you are netting $18.37 each and every day.

Sounds to me like Alerion XMT (with the few examples provided) pays for itself over 11 times each day in time savings alone. Add to that the extensive analysis reporting to make better buying decisions and all the other tools geared to make you more profitable, Alerion XMT a must have.