Choose the perfect retail & wholesale back office system.

Imagine you’re about to buy a car, (and for the purposes of the analogy you know nothing about cars!), you might turn up to the showroom or forecourt, perhaps with some pre-prepared idea of what questions you should ask to ensure you make good decisions. But having not done this before, you might look under the bonnet, kick the tyres, ask about the car service history and make a decision on the price relative to other cars you’ve seen.

In these situations, you may not know what you don’t know. And the same goes for buying back office software.

Now imagine that someone who has been through this process many hundreds of times before, compiled a list that they gave you in advance, which helped you to ask the right questions, relative to your requirements. Those questions might help you to decide what else is or isn’t important to you that you’d not already considered.

You may decide that, armed with the right questions from an expert, you decide to change what is important to you altogether, or you may just reaffirm what you already know. In both situations, you’re comfortable that you’ve made the right decision, and reduced the risk to you and your business.

We’ve created a free back office selection criteria template for this exact purpose, saving you time, energy and quite a few headaches.

The template aims to equip you and your business with a comprehensive set of questions and requirements. This ensures that you and your chosen back office vendors can focus your energy on what is most important to you and your business, and how they’re going to support your needs.

When looking for software, most focus on two areas: features and price. Both are important, but very few seek to understand their nonfunctional requirements. Most software projects fail, not because of a lack of features, but because of poor migration, poor adoption, poor change management, and a lack of ongoing support to a required standard.

This template should be used for your own business, as a ready-made tool so that you can run an efficient and thorough selection process, from which to benchmark your different options.

Our template will help you to recognize your high level requirements, such as:

• What functional elements of the business are you looking to integrate?
• An easy way to prioritize required functionality.
• What are your expected outcomes or results?
• What are your business goals?
• What is your strategy to achieve these?
• How will your back office support your goals?
• Who is part of your software evaluation team?

You’ll find a set of functional and nonfunctional requirements within it; many of which may be important, some of which won’t. The template allows you to simply review with your team which ones are should, could, or nice to have, which gives you a crucial missing part to most requirements lists - priority!

You can then use the template to benchmark and score your shortlisted providers against your true requirements, both functional (features) and nonfunctional (contractual, performance, deployment options, charging structure and more).