Vend-Trak may be your very first purchase of vending related software and as such, I wanted to give you a comprehensive understanding of how it works. If you haven't read it, my Vend-Trak review shows my overall thoughts and impressions and answered a few questions that you might have when considering to buy it.
This Vend-Trak walkthrough, on the other hand, will detail all the various screens, so you get a really good idea of what Vend-Trak offers and how they offer it. So fair warning, it's pretty exhaustive.
When you log in to Vend-Trak, you'll start at the Dashboard. On the top are links to different screens that will give you tools for different parts of your business. I cover these all in detail below as well as my particular thoughts on how well they work in the program.
Dashboard
This is where you begin using Vend-Trak. Like any dashboard on a computer program, this gives you a lot of shortcuts, so you can easily move to the part of the program that you want to get to. There are widgets for your calendar of services, generating your cash flow and expense reports, and a drop down that allows you to get to the location or route screens. Each of these things also has their own screen, except for the calendar, so I will discuss that in this section and the others' in their respective sections.
Calendar
The big dealbreaker for using this as your primary route calendar is that there is no ability to drag and drop an event from one day to another, like on google calendar or other similar applications. Having said that, this is still a great feature as it allows you to visually see your route for the entire month. This is huge because you might have a service schedule on certain locations that are more than a week and scheduling vending routes with differing schedules can become a huge hassle without a wide enough perspective.
One great feature of this is, if you have services due, the calendar will make it known on the day, by displaying "# services due" where # is the number of scheduled services due for that day. You then place your mouse cursor over the text and it displays a popup showing exactly which services are due. When you set up your machine locations, you can specify the service schedule of those machines and those will automatically update on your calendar. The services that are due will appear in in the popup. Since this is interlinked with the rest of the Vend-Trak system, you can click on each individual location to go to their respective pages in Vend-Trak.
Your calendar also shows how much in total was collected on each day, so though it's not the best for planning, it's fantastic for looking at your past schedule.
Overall impressions
The dashboard is a really good place to start and it gives you intuitive and associational navigation to any portion of the site you need to get to, without having to first think, "Which category holds the information I need?" It's clearly created by someone who has run or is currently running a vending business. The interface is dense without feeling overly cluttered. As said above, the calendar is very useful and a great way to get a bird's eye view of your business while still being able to easily access all the rest of Vend-Trak with sometimes only one click. It would be nice if you could see the locations that needed service without moving the cursor over each day. I personally handle between 30-40 separate locations – each with their own specific service period. Because of this, my route schedule is pretty variable. I have to redo my schedule at least once a week, if not once per day.
The calendar portion is perfect for anyone who has a very consistent route that they work, and it is workable for someone like me who's service period's aren't perfectly in sync. For route scheduling, I will continue to use google calendar until they implement a drag and drop feature in Vend-Trak. However, I will use Vend-Trak to track how much money was collected and on what day it was collected.
Locations screen
Before getting into the functions of this screen I want to make something very clear: In the Vend-Trak system, a location refers to a machine, not a whole account. Locations can be grouped into "location groups" where one is specified as the master. This is similar to a directory structure in the filing system on your computer. By making something a location group and specifying a master location, it's like creating a new folder. By creating sub-locations it's like putting things in that locations' folder. This is a little tricky semantically, because often people refer to an entire place of business when they say location, so you have to make the mental shift that, according to Vend-Trak, location means one machine or, to get more technical, one income stream. If you know programming, it's helpful to think of it like a location of data, not a physical location.
This also will inform which package you should purchase. For example, the cheapest package is for 1-50 machines, not locations with machines. So if you have a route with 50 what you call locations – some with more than one machine each – then you will need to purchase the next level package.
Now, onto the actual program itself:
The first thing you'll notice is your locations list, which takes up the left 2/3rd of the of the screen. It defaults to showing all of them in alphabetical order, but you can also filter them by first letter, or by any of the fields on a particular location – including name, phone number, city, machine type, etc. Each location link has 4 icons to their left which allow you to access various subscreens or other features. They are fairly intuitive (The dollar sign takes you to the "record service" screen for example.) Each location is also a link to that particular location's sub-screen, which I will talk about in a second.
On the bar on the right side of the screen are some widgets with helpful info. At the top it shows the number of locations (read: machines) that you have in service. The "key" widget tells you what each icon next to each location link in the locations list refers to. Below that is "Add New Location", which takes you to the new location screen.
Below that is "Select a Route to Service" Here you can select your route from a drop down and click submit. This generates a new page where you can record services for an entire route's worth of work. This is a great screen because, especially if you're using a smart phone, you don't have to click to each location separately. You can just enter the fields as you get to each machine. If you are recording this data only once in the field (as opposed to twice like with a sheet of paper and an electronic entry), since this is sensitive data, I would recommend clicking the "save service record" at the end after every group of machines. This is to guard against that data getting lost if your phone crashes . If, however, you are at home and are using a desktop computer, this page is great since you can just enter all the data you collected on a route on one page and submit it all at once. Screens like this really show me the efficiency that a program like this gives to a business, especially one with so much data entry.
Underneath that you can find the advanced filter options widget. Using these and then selecting the "filter locations" button will filter your locations list. This is a great feature especially if you own a business with multiple routes or accounts that are in different cities.
Each location can be filled with lots of data including their name, contact person, address and more. In addition, you can add custom fields so you can record things like their hours of operation, what keys you use, the asset or serial number, or anything else you can think of. There are many custom fields that you can just chock full of data. This is great for someone like me who always has a thousand things on their mind when I'm on a route.
Subscreens
If you click on a location, you'll go to that locations' set of subscreens which allows you to record services, edit details, view statistics, view map, or delete the location. The most common screen you'll use is the record services screen. Accessing this screen will allow you to create a new record or look at the history of any of the data you've recorded such as the sales, meter reading, or products you put into the machine. These screens are densely packed with information and fields. The statistics screen allows you to see a little mini report of the earnings, when the machine was installed, when it was last serviced, average gross, and more. View map displays a google map of the exact location of that machine. This is nice especially if you're going to new location. It doesn't do GPS navigation however.
Impressions
Like the dashboard, this screen is great in that it only shows what you need to see and it allows you to take a different birds eye view of your business. I'm particularly impressed with the "select a route to service" drop down menu since I'll often service multiple machines that are right next to each other. Given that this is a web-based application, every time you click a button it is essentially loading a new page, which takes time. Being able to have a list of all the machines on your route and enter all of the necessary data at the same time is a huge time saver whether the route driver or data entry person does it.
The subscreens are incredibly dense which I like because it's great to be able to brain dump things like the name of the front desk person at a location (Matt, or was it Tim?) so that I can focus on the things that really matter in my day. Furthermore it's nice to have it all together in one central location so all the data can talk to each other.
Products screen
This page has a similar setup to the locations page, where there is a list that takes up the left ⅔ of the screen and then a number of widgets comprising the right side. Each product has fields for their name, type, cost per unit, price per unit, and ID. The fields for each product, unlike the location list, are editable, so in case any of them change, you can edit them right in the list without having to open a new page. The right widgets are "add new products", and "merge two products". The "add new product" allows you to add a product which will appear in the list, and I'm not sure why you can "merge a product". Perhaps if two people use the system and have entered similar named products? The example they give is merging Coke and Coca Cola. While product duplication in this system is probably not a huge issue, it's nice to know that there is a feature for it.
The product page is great for keeping track of your inventory. In Vend-Trak you must add products to the product list in order to have the option to record how much you put in a particular location on that location's subscreen. If you only service vending machines, this may not be of use to you, but if you invoice for anything – such as free vend, office coffee service, or water filtration systems - then this is a great addition. You can tally up all the products you deliver to the location where you invoice in Vend-Trak.
Overall impressions
Not much here so not much to say. One thing I did find odd is that you can't add product types to the drop down menu, so you have to once again use the naming conventions of Vend-Trak which may not be what you're used to. The product types are defined by the kinds of machines that they go into, so while Powerade is technically a beverage, the selection you would use is "soda", because it goes in a soda machine. This is helpful if you buy different sizes of chips; full vending size for snack machines and smaller sizes for combo machines for example.
Also, there doesn't seem to be a way to bulk edit fields, if for example a bottler raised prices on beverages across the board and you didn't want to change the prices on thirty beverages one by one.
Expenses
This screen is for keeping track of all the expenses of your business, which is used in the reports screen. The fields of each entry are the date, payee, description of service, a drop down with the type of service, the amount, and a very neat ability to assign an expense to a location. So, for example if you need to buy a new bill validator to install into a snack machine, you can assign your expense to that machine. This is the most similar to something like Quickbooks or other general accounting software.
Overall impressions
It does what it needs to do and makes the reporting system quite powerful.
Mileage
This screen is for tracking the mileage on your delivery vehicle. The fields include the date, user, the number of miles, and notes. What if you don't know the miles? There is a mileage calculator. Below that is your list of mileage entries, which you can sort by user or year. The program assumes that each user only drives one delivery vehicle, which is probably the case 90% of the time and it assumes that you'll want it displayed by the year, which is likely also correct.
Overall impressions
This is a great little addition that allows you to keep a record of your mileage for tax purposes. Like the expenses screen, it's pretty bare bones and mileage is sorted by user, not by vehicle, although you could put that in the notes section. This is an example where I like the minimal features because it focuses on the most likely scenario for this tool.
Routes
The route screen follows the same visual layout of a large list taking up the left two thirds, and a couple widgets occupying the right. The main portion of the screen is the route list, which shows each route's name, description, and size. A route as displayed on the list is a collection of locations that are often serviced together or simply a collection of locations that you might want to service in a day. In addition to routes you create, the list also shows automatically generated routes. More on that in a second.
The widgets on the right side allow you to add a new route, or auto-generate a route. Both add routes to your list, but one is manual based on the locations you select, and another is automatic based on locations that are due by a certain day. With these, you input the service date and it automatically checks all the locations that are in need of service between now and then. This is great if you have a more variable schedule.
Once it's been created, to edit a route, click the name of the route on the list. By doing this you go to the route sub-screen. Here you have a list of all locations with some drop down menus to help filter them, and a route list for that route. You can select locations from the list, add them to the current route list, and change the order how you like. This is great for keeping track of your route on a daily basis. The program goes one step further and, provided each location has their address in the system, it will give you a listing of the most optimized route. Of course this only works perfectly if there's no traffic or hours of operation, but it's a handy tool nonetheless, especially because there is a visual map which will show your exact route. A route that is auto-generated can also be edited, so that you can do things like reorder the sequence of locations.
Overall impressions
This is a fantastic feature of the program. While the location/machine mixup is a little weird, this feature is dead on and great for scheduling a day. I love that they leveraged GPS in this program to make it much easier to determine your ideal route path. One thing I wish they had was a field for time estimations, so you could do all your daily scheduling with this program.
Reports
The reports screen is exhaustive in a good way. If you're thinking about using this program, this is the screen where you will get the most value and where Vend-Trak is at its most robust. By keeping track of all your service and business data in one program, as opposed to different spreadsheets, you can now select between a wide variety of reports and greatly streamline the paperwork in your business. You can generate cash flow reports, location reports, reports by route, product usage, and more. In the "other" reports section you'll find some goodies like sales tax and commission calculators.
If you are running your own business, you know how time consuming paperwork can be. Every 3 months in California we have to generate sales tax reports. Annually, we generate the total annual sales report, mostly because it takes so much time to do. With these reports, you can auto generate them all. It might be annoying to switch to the Vend-Trak database if you're familiar with something else, but the sheer volume of different ways you can use these reports to look at the data of your business makes that all more than worth it.
It didn't look like there was an easy way to export these numbers into a spreadsheet, but it does come in a printer friendly version.
Overall impressions
Vend-Trak is a little eccentric in places, but the report-generating system ties the package together in a beautiful way. If you are concerned on whether you would actually save money using a system like this, this section alone fulfills that promise. As I've said in other sections, I wouldn't necessarily recommend this program for every feature – you may find some things more useful than others - but the report section I can heartily recommend.
Videos
This screen is just a list of links to tutorial videos for different aspects of Vend-Trak. It covers most everything you need to know, but the more nuanced things, like how to record a meter reading at a location, are not covered. In general, Vend-Trak is pretty good about having the information on how to use the product on the specific page itself, which means these videos are largely unnecessary for day to day use. For example it gives you instruction on how to add a route on the route subscreen. In using the program, I only went to the forums once because I was confused. Everything else was either made apparent or generally intuitive for someone who runs a vending business.
Other features of note
Multiple users
They clearly made this program for every size of business. The company I work for has 4 route drivers, so this program is perfect. Each user can have their own routes assigned to them and each user has a different tier of privileges based on their user type. The owner of a business can see everyone's data, whereas a driver can only see their own data.
Customer view
Not sure how often I would use this feature, but it's interesting nonetheless. This feature gives you the ability to custom generate an html page that you can give to your customer so they can see different statistics about your account. This would be useful so they can find out without calling you when you'll be coming next or what other products you might have so they can email you requesting different products. It's a nice feature, but given that customers often don't even call, I'm not convinced they would visit a website that had to do with their vending machine.
Overall impressions of Vend-Trak
Vend-Trak is not a perfect piece of software. You need to learn how to use it and there will be a learning curve as you adapt to how it works, not the other way around. Having said that, these kinds of programs are still in their infancy and this program offers a ton of useful tools for really streamlining your business. Managing your vending business can be a full time job, and, if it were me, I'd rather spend money on software that helps me manage it, so I could focus on making more money and building my business.
Overall, I'd highly recommend Vend-Trak for anyone who is growing to the point where the time they are spending doing paperwork is getting in the way of the time that they could be following up on sales calls, training new employees, or just relaxing. If you are just getting into the vending business and only have a couple of machines, this is likely too robust for you and an unnecessary cost. But, if vending is your full time business and you want to build for the future, I would get Vend-Trak in a heartbeat. Don't take my word for it though, sign up for a free trial of Vend-Trak and take it for a test run. You don't have to pay anything for 14 days and you can get a full refund for 60 days after you sign up (not 60 days after the trial ends). If you think this might help you, then click on the button below to sign up:
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