If you can get your inventory and customer information out of your current program and into an excel spreadsheet, you can do the following.
1. Open the demo program.
2. Export a customer or inventory file in a REDI file format. This can be done by choosing Export from the Tools menu item and walking through the wizard.
3. Open this file in a text editor or Excel. This will show you the structure that the import file from your previous point of sale program needs to be in in order to import your data. You will need to make sure your POS inventory and or customer file in Excel matches this format. Try it with one record to keep it simple until you are familiar with the file format. You can find more information about this
here.
NOTE: A more simplistic import is available with just a strait
CSV import. This can be useful for importing data from a vendor file as well for pricing updates. But if you want to take advantage of some of the more complex inventory features like matrixes or need to make adjustments to average costs, or minimum and maximums, then REDI is a better option for you. REDI is a more complex file format and so sometimes you can do an initial import with CSV to get your data into RetailEdge, then Export it as a REDI, and then just modify the export to add the fields you want (e.g., minimums and maximums).
OR
You can pay us to do it for you. We can typically import customer and inventory data files in a couple of hours ($200). If you send over a copy of your customer and inventory files we can give you a better estimate.
Customer sales histories are more complicated and typically take a long time to import (if they can be imported at all). Most RetailEdge users typically just leave a copy of their old program on the machine and if they need to go back and refer to it they will just open the old program and run it. If there is specific information like customer store credits or account balances you need to bring over try the following:
1. Print out a list of customer balances and store credits.
2. Run RetailEdge and set your Windows system clock back to a previous date. Some people use the beginning of the year some just a few days before they officially start using RetailEdge.
3. Ring in sales to the customers for a non-entered item (enter item number 0 on the sales screen) and enter a description like "pevious house charge balance" for the amount of the balance. If you have a customer's with store credits, you can simply manually enter these Store Credits in the customers' records.
4. Perform a RetailEdge closing.
5. Set your system clock back to today's date.
You will then just need to know that you should not run reports (sales, customer sales, etc.) for date ranges that extend before the date chosen for this operation.