What is GrossTurnOver (GTO) Reporting
Singapore is one of the countries in the world that has the highest number of shopping mall. There are more than 171 malls currently in the city state across every corner of Singapore. Despite the high number of shopping center here serving 6 millions population, most of the mall are still filled with high footfall and difficult to find parking for those who drive. This has to do with the tropical weather and shopping mall has created a fairly comfortable environment to cool you down and offer the shopper various choices of lifestyle products, kids enrichment classes, F&b establishment and occasionally some atrium sales or product exhibition.
Ability to attract foot fall is one of the key performance indicator that landlords are measuring constantly. And the landlords are investing heavily in marketing, logistics, and technology to increase competitiveness to get more shoppers everyday.
Landlord or shopping mall operator's revenue mainly contributed by the rental from each tenant by providing a commercially viable bricks and mortal shop lot that has high foot traffic, so that the tenant can take advantages of selling more products and earn revenue from it. And this is a mutually beneficial ecosystems for landlord, tenant and shopper where it fulfil the needs of everyone.
One of the challenges that Landlord is facing today is about putting the right price for a shop lot based on its effectiveness to attract shopper and ability to convert them into sales. More savvy landlord will look at both figures of foot fall and sales, but generally most landlord will only look at sales figure from each tenant to analyse rental value of a particular shop lot.
In order for landlord to achieve this, they need the sales data from each tenant and that is the basic concept of Gross Turnover GTO reporting. At this point, we have to look into the interests of landlord and tenant separately.
Landlord key interest is to maximise the rental and get the most out of it, while tenant (merchant) seek to lower the operational cost (including rental) and maximise sales revenue. It is obvious that, rental has a contradicting view between 2 stakeholders and that will lead to trustworthiness of the sales report that tenant provided to the landlord. And that is the main reason that GrossTurnover reporting become the primary source of data to fulfil both landlord and tenant's need.
How GTO reporting simplify tenant management
GTO reporting is the core function within a TMS (tenant management system). Landlord need the sales data from tenant POS system for analysing the tenant performance and also fine tune its marketing campaign to attract shopper.
Most shopping malls in Singapore require the tenants to have their POS system integrated with shopping mall GTO reporting system and automatically upload the sales data into mall server. This often mentioned as mall integration. The reason for the tenant POS system to integrate with mall GTO server is to increase the accuracy, reduce the latency and get rid of human errors from manual reporting.
Typically shopping mall landlord will appoint a IT vendor to coordinate with tenant on integration with their POS system, ensure that the GTO reporting is prompt, and the data is accurate. And tenant must comply with these requirements and furnish the sales data before the cutoff date. Tenant will usually engage their POS vendor to develop a script to integrate their POS system to the mall IT systems. Once integration is completed and certified by mall agent, it will start to submit GTO reporting automatically to the mall.
As compare to the manual GTO reporting, integrated GTO reporting can significantly reduce time and error on both end and ensure compliances.
How to modernise GTO reporting
Majority of the shopping malls in Singapore are still using aging technology to accept GTO sales data from tenant POS systems.
Despite the popularity of cloud-based POS systems dominating retail and food & beverage business and even government grant supporting SME has dictated that only cloud-based POS system will qualify for the financial aid, but the infrastructure used for GTO sales submission are still using file transfer protocol (FTP) or secure file transfer protocol (SFTP).