Small and medium-sized digital business tools company Yoco has added a range of new features to its platform. The tools connect and share data to provide business owners with real-time insight into their enterprises, says Yoco co-founder Carl Wazen.

“Our customers tell us they are often buried under administrative work and have to choose between managing their business or growing it. We therefore redesigned our solution and added more than 50 features, all of which can be used with the same simplicity as our other tools,” he says.

These have been rolled out and are in the company's client merchants' hands at no extra cost.

Further, some of its small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) customers struggle to manage omnichannel sales.

A boutique customer of Yoco was selling products over interest sharing service Instagram and had to confirm banking details and payments, which took up to 15 minutes.

Now, the boutique owner sends a Yoco payment link directly from her app that enables one-touch payment by her customers using either Google Pay or Apple Pay.

Further, Yoco has adopted a comment by a Cape Town-based barista customer that “every sale is a confirmation that I made the right decision to start my business” as the mantra for its reporting features.

“Liam used to do stock count using pen and paper, track orders in his head and manually enter sales on an Excel spreadsheet. Now he checks the most important trends of his business on a widget on his phone and can reorder stock mid-task from the Yoco app,” Wazen illustrates.

Most small businesses do not only want to see their business' numbers, but want to know what products are selling best, which staff member is performing well and how sales are doing in real-time, he adds.

Yoco's reporting feature is a fast and visual tool to enable businesses to see their most important information at a glance, and also gives them clarity of their business's performance based on their data, Wazen emphasises.

Additionally, Yoco has deepened bespoke solutions for customers in specific sectors, including its solutions for its food and beverage industry customers.

Its food and beverage solutions enable small businesses to track stock in real-time, handle split bills and print itemised receipts, among others.

The customer's products and their prices are preloaded and are automatically displayed on the payment machines, helping to eliminate mistakes and fraud, Wazen says.

Similarly, the Yoco Counter solution is designed to provide high-volume cafés and retail stores with a complete suite of tools, including allowing users to automatically pass through orders to the kitchen that can also easily be tracked, use preloaded amounts and customise their point of sales machines with their own brands.

“We have also included one-touch tipping, which has dramatically increased the likelihood of tips for many of our customers as tipping is now a part of the flow of the transaction. We have, so far, cumulatively processed close to R1-billion in tips that were redistributed to staff because owners can easily track them,” he says.

Its Table by Yoco solution for full and quick-service restaurants provides similar capabilities, including real-time monitoring of stock levels, margins and staff performance on the app.

For this solution, Yoco deploys its engineers to set up the solution and to train customers' staff, and it also has financing options available, if customers need them, he notes.

Meanwhile, Yoco, which derives 70% of its transaction volumes from businesses in the food and beverage, retail and health and beauty sectors, first focused on developing solutions for its food and beverage customer, says Yoco co-founder Katlego Maphai.

The need to enable high-frequency transactions drove the company to develop its more advanced and integrated solutions, and this had strong knock-on effects in other sectors it serves.

“This is where we are focused at the moment, but, going forward, we want to pay greater attention to the retail and health and beauty sectors and aim to build more vertical, industry-specific solutions for these businesses so that we can deepen our support model and how we help our customers,” he says.

Founded in 2015 to improve ease of payments for small businesses, Yoco is now entering the product phase of its growth.

“Small businesses struggle to use disparate solutions that do not talk to each other and struggle to make sense of information spread across systems, while routine and manual administration tasks are non-value adding activities, and we believe technology can take care of that.

“We want to give this time back to our customers to focus on things that matter to them, namely providing their products and services, gaining new customers and retaining existing ones. These are value-adding activities for our customers,” says Maphai.

Yoco has about 200 000 customers that regularly use its platform, and has processed more than R170-billion in card transactions on its platform since its founding.

“We have evolved from being the blue card machine company to an all-in-one digital commerce platform for small businesses.

“We orientate ourselves by focusing on creating value. Our job is to build products to help merchants run better, in a more organised and more formalised manner, And, as they grow, we grow. It is that simple,” he says.

The company would detail these and other capabilities at its Yoco Next event during the week of April 7 to 11.